Matt Sizemore visited the National Weather Service Forecast office in Boise to find out how these weather balloons and their weather instruments travel 20 miles up in the air to get you the most accurate forecast every day. Every single day of the year, this garage at the National Weather Service Forecaster's Office in Boise is slowly opened, revealing one of the most highly sophisticated, top-secret projects that our country has ever It sets the foundation.
You need to have good information as your foundation for the forecast models," said National Weather Service Hydrometeorological Technician Wasyl Hewko. But highly-sophisticated and important? It's just one of many to be launched worldwide at that exact time. We've got about ten in the tropics and Bahamas area, and then the worldwide, I've been told it's plus," said Hewko.
Once this balloon and attached weather instrument are launched, it travels roughly 20 miles into the sky, and after an hour, sends back a plethora of information. But, of course, like any weather data, it gets dated pretty quickly cause everything is always changing," said National Weather Service Senior Meteorologist Stephen Parker.
Model data is an attempt to tell us what's coming, but the balloon tells us what's actually here right now," said Parker. If everything went right with every single launch, they'd get weather balloons up into the stratosphere per year. But like anything, things don't always go according to plan, meaning they need to re-launch on rare occasions. Fortunately, we caught the moment when the balloon relayed that this particular morning's mission was a success.
This is one of our milestones right now. And this actually is millibar level, and I'll show you on this graphic here, you can see that the balloon has reached millibars, which is one of the levels where they consider the flight a legitimate flight now," said Hewko. Typically, a balloon's journey ends just before the two-hour mark when it gets so high and expands so greatly, the pressure causes it to burst.
