Around the World They Go: Circumnavigating Balloon Satellites!

Abstract

Students from the University of Alabama in Huntsville successfully deployed three micro super-pressure balloon satellites in winter 2021. Students planned and implemented all phases of the project from 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 tools 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 tee balloons successfully traveled hundreds of thousands of kilometers, making an accumulated total of 16 global circumnavigations. Toughout 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.

TGFs, Gamma‐Ray Glows, and Direct Lightning Strike Radiation Observed During a Single Flight of a Balloon‐Borne Gamma‐Ray Spectrometer

“…Previous studies have utilized radiosonde balloons to gain an understanding of thermodynamic properties influencing thunderstorms (Bartos et al, 2022;Coniglio & Parker, 2020;Stolzenburg & Marshall, 2009). Additionally, weather balloon flights have been instrumental in determining the radio refractive index of the atmosphere (Clinger & Straiton, 1960;Hao et al, 2022;Pham & Nguyen, 2022), while smaller pico balloons have proven useful in investigating ionospheric signal propagation over remote regions (McKinney, 2023a(McKinney, , 2023b(McKinney, , 2023c. Previous work has been done using balloon-based platforms to understand radiation and TGF detection in thunderstorms.…”

Insights on Polar Day Antarctica Radio Propagation Using Amateur Radio Beacons on Circumnavigating Balloons

“…Balloons have also been recently used to understand very low frequencies (VLFs) and their apparent frequency changes with changing altitudes [16]. While the utilization of pico balloons carrying WSPR transmitters has gained popularity among balloon and amateur radio enthusiasts in recent years [17,18], there is a lack of published literature on the propagation results obtained from these balloon flights. Utilizing balloons for propagation studies offers the advantage of comparing propagation results against specific locations, allowing for a comprehensive analysis beyond time-based observations, which is not possible with stationary WSPR setups.…”