Around the World They Go Circumnavigating Balloon Satellites!

Abstract

Students from the University of Alabama in Huntsville successfully deployed three micro superpressure balloon satellites in winter 2021. Students planned and implemented all phases of the project: obtaining funding, determining project timelines, preparing equipment, launching balloons, designing and implementing a website, writing daily blogs on the balloon progress, and analyzing the data. The objective of the flights was to use the balloons as a meteorological tool to study conditions in the lower stratosphere (12-14 km), as a tracer for evaluating modeled air parcel trajectories, and as an outreach and educational tool. The three balloons successfully traveled hundreds of thousands of kilometers, making an accumulated total of 16 global circumnavigations. Throughout the project, students made connections with hundreds of researchers, ham radio operators, STEM groups, and other students around the globe. The balloons provided velocity telemetry within many different weather regimes, including vigorous jets over the Himalayas, slow-moving equatorial air masses over the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and dense polar air masses over the Arctic Circle. This study has found that the accuracy of HYSPLIT-calculated trajectories using numerical weather predication (NWP) meteorological data can be quantified using parcel velocity, duration of trajectory forecast, and spatial resolution of the NWP model.