What Goes Up, Must Come Down. What Do You Do When You Find a Radiosonde?

 One of the backbones of the meteorological observing network is the radiosonde, a balloon-launched weather station that rises to around 110,000 feet before the balloon bursts and the instrument package plummets back to Earth, slowed by a small parachute.

Such radiosondes are launched twice a day at approximately 1000 locations around the world.

Most U.S. National Weather Service sites use a radiosonde made by the Finnish company Vaisalla, and specifically, the RS 41 unit shown below.  The projection at the top has the temperature and humidity sensors, a digital barometer is inside, and winds are derived by tracking the movement of the unit.


One of the great pleasures of doing this blog is the emails I receive from many of you, with all kinds of observations and questions.  

Well, today I got an email from Ian Cruickshank; while he was hiking in the forest in the Sooke Hills near Victoria, BC, guess what he found?  An American radiosonde unit (see the proof below).


He asked me where it was launched and I knew there was really only one possibility: the National Weather Service launch site at the Quillayute Airport on the Olympic Peninsula.   Here is a map showing the radiosonde launch location and where the unit ended up. About 55 miles away.


I am often asked what one should do with one of these units if you find one.  In the old days, the NWS wanted you to return them....no longer.  Just trash it...or better yet, keep it as a rare souvenir.

There are hobbyists that maintain websites that track radiosondes, acquire their weather data, and attempt to find them after landing.   One such site showed the recent landing locations of the radiosondes launched from Quillayute the past few days (below).  Most of them landed in Olympic National Park.


And consider the routes taken by the Salem, Oregon radiosonde (see below)--mainly landing in the central Oregon Cascades.  That looks like a good place to go radiosonde searching.


If there is a really strong jet stream, radiosondes can travel up to two hundred miles downwind during their typical two-hour flight.

Perhaps the most amusing radiosonde recovery story occurred a few years ago in my Atmospheric Sciences 101 class.  I had just given a lecture about radiosondes and the next day a student walked in with one.  Smiling.   I was dumbfounded.  While he was playing basketball at a frat house in the University District, a radiosonde had floated in.   

I gave him extra credit, of course.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Time of Year You Can See the Air Move

Image
  Most of the time, you can not see the air move.   You can feel it, but the complex, turbulent motions are invisible to you, except when it interacts with leaves and branches on trees and plants. But for a few weeks of the year, the sky is full of small, cotton-like tuffs that like a natural MRI machine reveals the complex three-dimensional motions of the atmosphere.   Cottonwood season.  And we right in the middle of it.   Being cottonwood aware is of particular value this year.  It reveals the active dispersion and movement of air that makes the outdoors essentially COVID safe, and thus should be of some comfort for those nervous about transmission outside. Cottonwood seeds are embedded in small cotton-like fibers.   A million seeds weigh about 3 pounds.  Yes, each seed and tuff weights about .000003 pounds.   And that fact, plus the cottonwood tuff, means that these seeds fall VERY, VERY, VERY slowly.   So slowly that they are excellent markers for the three-dimensional flow of the
Read more

Why so little lightning in the Pacific Northwest? And a very nice weekend ahead.

Image
During the past 24-hours, there have been a few lightning strokes over the region (see below) but nothing to write home about (see below). It turns out that the Pacific Northwest and the remainder of the West Coast have some of the lowest frequencies of thunderstorms in the entire country (see below). But why?    My podcast provides the answer. And I also give the weekend forecast....and I think most will like what I have to say. To listen to my podcast, use the link below or access it through your favorite podcast service. Some major podcast servers:     Like the podcast? Support on Patreon 
Read more

Strong Atmosphere River Heads into British Columbia and Southeast Alaska

Image
While the Northwest has been drier than normal, it has been drenching wet a few hundred miles to the north. An unusually strong atmospheric river ....a long current of moisture stretching southward to the subtropics...has been in place for days, bringing large amounts of water vapor to Alaska.   And the atmospheric river will be in place for several more days, slowly moving southward. To illustrate, the scale and beauty of the atmospheric river, here is a water vapor satellite image for 11 AM today. The lighter areas have more water vapor.  You can see the current of moisture extending from near Hawaii into central BC.  This current is the result of low pressure over the Gulf of Alaska and high pressure offshore of California.   A forecast of total water vapor content in the atmosphere for 11 PM tonight shows a healthy atmospheric river (white and blue colors indicate the higher amounts of moisture). As this atmospheric river slams into the mountainous West Coast, the air is forced to
Read more