100,000 feet up and 213 miles away. That’s how far a weather balloon traveled from the Quad Cities on Valentine’s Day.
A family in Indiana recovered it.
“Doing our trail checks on our property and I got out to the back pasture and I looked at one of the trees and noticed there was a string hanging from it with an orange balloon in it,” said Devin Tharp, the first one to come across the balloon.
“It was totally unexpected. We had no idea what he had found because he would not tell us what it was. He just kept saying you won’t believe what it is,” said Mike Tharp, Devin’s father.
National Weather Service offices across the country launch weather balloons two times a day, every day.
The Indiana family that’s more than 200 miles away from Davenport found one that Peter Speck from the Quad Cities office launched.
“We use this information as a way to see what’s going on in the entire atmosphere. It’s also vastly important because we use this information in our daily forecast model runs.” said NWS Meteorologist Peter Speck.
Weather balloons have been used since the late 1800s. The balloons carry instruments called radiosondes that send back measurements remotely. The information they gather is used to improve forecasting models.
All of the radiosondes come with a mailing bag. If you find one like they found in Indiana, you can take it, stick it in the bag, you can seal it up, and you can help the National Weather Service save money because it will go to Kansas City where they can restore it.”
“We don’t usually recover too many. I believe it’s about a quarter of the radiosondes we do get returned back. A lot of them will usually end up in remote rural areas and so forth,” said Speck.
It is a rare occasion to find a balloon as they can end up anywhere but as this Delphi family says, it’s experience you won’t soon forget.
“It’s just kind of crazy to realize how much communication there is with all the states and everything.” said Devin.
Communication that continues to improve forecasting from an age-old idea.
