Short Stuff: Weather Balloons

Weather balloons are the workhorse of the meteorological world, which is why they’ve been used daily around the world for most of a century. Let’s salute these unsung heroes of weather prediction by getting to know them better. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Josh Clark?

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• 1:06Josh Clark?

  Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry sitting in for Dave. And this is a good old fashioned straight ahead, stuff you should know, short stuff about something kind of science, but also just really interesting in a bunch of different ways. So let's go.

• 1:22Speaker 02

  So maybe you've walked outside of your house, or maybe you're on a hike through the woods in the wilderness nearby, and you've come across this weird synthetic burst rubber balloon laying on the ground.

• 1:35Josh Clark?

  Are you talking to me?

• 1:37Speaker 02

  Yes, you.

• 1:38Josh Clark?

  Oh, well, no, I haven't.

• 1:40Speaker 02

  All right, that settles that.

• 1:42Josh Clark?

  Okay.

• 1:43Speaker 02

  But let's say you had, there's a very good chance that could be a weather balloon.

• 1:47Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I wish I had. I would love to have an anecdote about that, but I don't.

• 1:53Speaker 02

  Wait, are you talking to me?

• 1:55Josh Clark?

  Yeah, Chuck, get this. I've never actually seen a weather balloon in person.

• 2:01Speaker 02

  That's what we're talking about, weather balloons. And I'm surprised we haven't covered this. These are, these are kind of cool and a kind of a perfect short stuff, I think.

• 2:07Josh Clark?

  Right. So let's talk about these things because they're the workhorse of weather and they really are just a couple of, couple of components, like a handful of components that gets launched. Well, I guess let's talk about the components. The big one is the balloon, but the balloon is really just kind of the dumbest part of the whole thing because the balloon is there to carry a box called a radiosonde or radiosonde in French.

• 2:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:36Josh Clark?

  It's about the size of a shoebox. It doesn't say what size shoebox. I mean, like, you know, Gary Coleman's shoebox and Shaquille O'Neal's shoeboxes were different size, so they didn't get specific enough for, for my tastes.

• 2:50Speaker 02

  I knew you were gonna say Shaquille O'Neal, by the way.

• 2:52Josh Clark?

  He has big feet, man.

• 2:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, he does.

• 2:56Josh Clark?

  And these shoeboxes, whichever size they are, they have got three really rudimentary crude atmospheric instruments, but that's, it turns out all you really need for these things.

• 3:06Speaker 02

  That's right. They have something called a thermostator. That is a little ceramic metal rod and it is a thermometer. They have a hydra store. Is that how you pronounce that?

• 3:18Josh Clark?

  Hygrister? Yeah.

• 3:21Speaker 02

  All right, one of the two, soft G or hard G? We're not sure. That is a humidity sensor. It's got a slide with a film of lithium chloride on it and it reads humidity through electrical resistance. Yeah? What else you got?

• 3:37Josh Clark?

  The aneroid barometer, aneroid barometer. So it measures air pressure because there's like a trigger that changes as the air pressure around it changes and it's allowed to kind of expand. And that's a big part of weather balloons as a, as a concept. The, the fact that the air pressure way up high where they go, and they go really high changes has, is kind of worked into the design of how these things work.

• 4:05Speaker 02

  Yeah. And there's a fourth thing to me, the most important thing. Actually, they all work together because they're all super important.

• 4:13Speaker 02

  And they, you know, if one of these is gone, well, actually if the thermometer was gone, you just wouldn't know the temperature and you could still know the humidity and the

• 4:21Speaker 02

  air pressure, right?

• 4:23Josh Clark?

  Sure, I guess so.

• 4:24Speaker 02

  I'm being silly. What I'm, what I'm saying is there's a transmitter up there, you guys. There's a radio transmitter and it, it relays this information down to the ground. And the reason why that's important is because these balloons go up, up, up, up, up and they get bigger and bigger and bigger until they're, I think they're about five feet in diameter when they start.

• 4:46Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 4:46Speaker 02

  By the time they get up to their, their dying point, they, they can be as big as a moving truck and those things burst and everything crashes down to the ground. There, there is a little parachute.

• 4:58Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 4:59Speaker 02

  That engages to take that radiosonde down to the ground gently, but they're not counting on finding that thing because that data has been transmitted back already.

• 5:09Josh Clark?

  Exactly. And that's what makes it so much more advantageous than what they were using back in the twenties and thirties, which is like kites or maybe a plane. You had to wait until the kite got real back in or the plane landed to get the data you needed to start doing calculations. This is, you know, almost real time data. I say we take a break and we come back and talk about weather balloon launches and some of the other things about weather balloons.

• 5:38Speaker 02

  Let's do it.

• 5:54Josh Clark?

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• 6:57Speaker 02

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• 7:10Josh Clark?

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• 8:03Josh Clark?

  Okay, Chuck, so there's some pretty neat stuff about weather balloons that we haven't even begun to touch on, right?

• 8:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:10Josh Clark?

  One of the first things is how high up they go. They go up to what's known as the stratosphere, which is the second to last layer before you hit outer space, second to last atmospheric layer before you hit outer space. And that's something like 18 miles, I think. Did you say that when you talked about it swelling up to the size of a truck?

• 8:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, that's, that's about the distance that it can go before you're in danger of, of rupturing.

• 8:36Josh Clark?

  Yeah. And I mean, like it's close to the edge of space. Tristan Hopper, the HowStuffWorks writer who wrote this, pointed out that, um, like if, if the weather balloon had eyes and a brain and all that, I'm adding that part. And it looked up, it'd be the blackness of outer space, but if it looked down, it'd see the blue sky below it. So it's, it's up there and it's pretty amazing. And then it pops and dies and the radiosonde comes back to the ground. And because these things work so well, because they're so actually cheap to do, I think it's like a few hundred dollars to release one, which compared to other techniques like a rocket launch or even an airplane ride.

• 9:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:12Josh Clark?

  It's very cheap and so much so that they, um, release these things a couple of times a day to the tune of like 67, 68,000 a year, just in the United States.

• 9:24Speaker 02

  Yeah. They have 92 weather stations that they do those a couple a day. And they've been doing this for, for many, many decades. When they first figured this out, they've been doing it since then. And there are more than 900 weather stations, uh, I think all over the world, like you said, that are doing this kind of thing. And the balloon itself is neoprene. It's a synthetic rubber. It's filled with either helium or hydrogen, depending on, uh, you know, which, uh, big gas you're in bed with. Hydrogen is cheaper, uh, can lift a little bit better and it's more easily extracted from water, but it's really flammable. As you can recall from the Hindenburg episode.

• 10:05Speaker 02

  So a lot of these things have exploded. So a lot of people will go with helium instead. But like you said, they're, they're, they're cheap. So they've been doing this with weather balloons for a long time. And the advantage, obviously, is that, you know, you're high up there. I know you said they use kites before to predict the weather, but the other thing they did was use their eyeballs and would lick their finger and hold it up in the air.

• 10:26Josh Clark?

  Yeah, this is a big point that about weather balloons. The reason that they let them go up so high, or they want them to go up so high is that you can really tell a lot more about weather at higher altitudes than you can from the ground, because it might look at like a nice sunny day here on earth. But then just, you know, a couple, tens of thousands of feet up in the air, there's like some disturbance in the force growing that's going to turn into a major thunderstorm that's going to produce a tornado that's going to kill a bunch of people. So if you have data about those things that are starting to form, you can predict what's going to happen and warn people with way more time than you could just from making ground based observations. So that's another reason why they're so relied

• 11:11Josh Clark?

  on is that all you need are these cheap instruments that are designed to basically just fall back to earth and be forgotten about.

• 11:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:18Josh Clark?

  And you can save, you know, lives of people from, from the information they're relaying back.

• 11:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. It's, it's kind of one of those just lo fi solutions that helps. If you think like, oh, wait, what happens here? These things just fall out in the woods like you were talking about? Or maybe hit somebody in the head?

• 11:37Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 11:37Speaker 02

  Thankfully, I don't think that's happened yet, but they do become litter, which is kind of the downer of all this. You know, they can travel hundreds of miles if they're in a good wind current, and they can land anywhere, basically. I think, you know, the idea of trying to send people out, or trucks out, or helicopters out to go retrieve these is that defeats the purpose of these being cheap. But, and this is a very cool, to me, the fact of the show is if you come across one of those radio signs, it comes with a postage paid envelope, and you can put that thing inside, an old weather balloon, and mail it back to the National Weather Service, and they'll send it back up again.

• 12:20Josh Clark?

  They do. They send it back up, and then they send you a junior weather service operator's T-shirt.

• 12:28Speaker 02

  Do they really?

• 12:28Josh Clark?

  No.

• 12:29Speaker 02

  Oh, God, they should.

• 12:30Josh Clark?

  They should, because I'm sure they get so few back that you could do that kind of thing, you know?

• 12:35Speaker 02

  I got a new life goal, man. I want to find one of these one day.

• 12:38Josh Clark?

  Awesome. Maybe, maybe it's like the Nielsen people, and they send you like three $1 bills.

• 12:46Speaker 02

  Yeah. Before we close, I think we have to mention, just to keep from getting emails, we got to mention the, the lawn chair guy.

• 12:55Josh Clark?

  Oh, for sure. Larry Walters?

• 12:57Speaker 02

  I thought we talked about him in maybe the Ig Nobel Awards. We may have, but we got to mention him again here.

• 13:02Josh Clark?

  Okay, so he was a truck driver who in 1982 decided that he wanted to float from Los Angeles over to the Rocky Mountains. He said, well, weather balloons work pretty well. I'm going to attach 42 of them to my lawn chair and see what happens. And he, he did this. He actually did. He lifted off, and things were going well for the first like minute or two.

• 13:26Speaker 02

  Yeah. He, you know, I guess he didn't do the math, or maybe that just wasn't his strong point, but.

• 13:31Josh Clark?

  He did Josh math.

• 13:33Speaker 02

  He ended up at 16,000 feet. And I know they made a movie about this, which I'm sure was portrayed as a lot of laughs, but, or maybe not, but I can't imagine anything more terrifying than being 16,000 feet above the air.

• 13:46Josh Clark?

  No.

• 13:47Speaker 02

  And, and realizing like, wow, I've really gotten in over my head here.

• 13:52Josh Clark?

  And this was July of 1982, so he wasn't dressed for 16,000 feet either, which is very chilly, right?

• 13:59Speaker 02

  Good point, yeah.

• 14:00Josh Clark?

  Yeah. So this was not a great experience for him. Luckily, even though he hadn't done the math correctly or at all, he did have the foresight to bring an air gun with him so that he could shoot out some of the balloons, or all of them, and land safely. So he just shot out some of the weather balloons, I guess, a little earlier than he expected to, and he landed gently back in somebody's backyard in Long Beach, probably Snoop Dogg's.

• 14:26Speaker 02

  Could you, have you seen pictures of this guy?

• 14:28Josh Clark?

  No.

• 14:29Speaker 02

  Flying over Los Angeles?

• 14:31Josh Clark?

  No, I haven't.

• 14:31Speaker 02

  All right, I'm going to send you a picture. It's incredible looking. It looks exactly like you think it would, yet it's still mind blowing.

• 14:39Josh Clark?

  Did he have like a seatbelt on the lawn chair, or is it just him sitting in a lawn chair?

• 14:44Speaker 02

  It's hard to tell, but it looks, I mean, if you zoom in, and this is a fake picture. I wonder if this is fake.

• 14:52Josh Clark?

  Oh, yeah.

• 14:52Speaker 02

  Because it looks like a guy sitting there watching the game with a beer in his hand. But that might have been the case.

• 14:58Josh Clark?

  Maybe, maybe.

• 15:00Speaker 02

  All right, I'm going to send it to you either way. I'll send it to you and Jerry right now.

• 15:04Josh Clark?

  If I had done this, and I reached 16,000 feet, you would, you would know that I was coming, because you would just hear my scream getting louder and louder, and it'd just be incessant and nonstop. And you would never be able to get me to let go of the lawn chair, because I'd be out of my mind, dissociated somewhere else, and it would just be a bad scene, I think.

• 15:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think the movie scene, it would just, it would show someone like in an outdoor cafe, and they're just like, they put their fork down, like, what am I hearing in the distance? And then it just gets louder, and then everyone's looking up. And it's not Superman.

• 15:39Josh Clark?

  Also, speaking of dissociation, I actually dissociated earlier in this episode when you were making your joke.

• 15:47Speaker 02

  Which one?

• 15:49Josh Clark?

  The one about the most important component.

• 15:52Speaker 02

  Oh, okay.

• 15:54Josh Clark?

  So that's why you didn't get a very good laugh out of me, because I was out of my body for a second.

• 16:00Speaker 02

  Hey, man, you don't have to explain anything to me after 18 years. All is forgiven on both of our accounts, right?

• 16:07Josh Clark?

  Thank you. Yes.

• 16:09Speaker 02

  Okay, good.

• 16:09Josh Clark?

  I just made the symbol of the cross with my two fingers.

• 16:13Speaker 02

  I'm sure that means something.

• 16:14Josh Clark?

  Okay, well, that's it for short stuff. So what does that mean, Chuck?

• 16:18Speaker 02

  It's out.

• 16:22Speaker 03

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