Potentially life saving balloons

When severe weather looms, having accurate data can be a meteorologist’s best bet for creating a forecast that will accurately warn and aid those impacted by dangerous weather. That data comes from a combination of observations, model output, and upper atmosphere data collection. To get this upper atmospheric data, we use weather balloons….But why is this data type so important? Jon Bongard, a PhD student studying Atmospheric sciences at Mizzou breaks down why balloon data matters.

“In our field, so much of what we use is modeled data, so it’s not absolute. It’s not true all the time. Models can be wrong sometimes, and so any time we can get real data that we know for a fact is 100 percent accurate, and that’s what this is, there’s no disputing what this radiosonde is recording up there. That’s really valuable information.”

Weather balloons provide temperature readings, dew point values, wind direction and strength, and a suggestion of how stable the atmosphere is as a whole. This is huge when severe weather events are pushing toward mid-missouri. Typically, weather balloon data comes from National Weather Service offices. The problem is that not all national weather service stations release weather balloons. That is why the University of Missouri in Columbia's Atmospheric Science Department is called upon. Almost two years ago, the National Weather Service called upon Mizzou to gather data before the storm system that formed the tornado that moved through Jefferson City well in advance of the event.

“The example we always like to use is the Jeff City tornado day. We got a message from I believe it was the St. Louis office asking us to fly the night before and so we came out and flew two or three balloons that day. We started in the morning and we flew morning, mid day, and I think we put one up in the afternoon just to give them an idea of one what was happening in the atmosphere and how it was changing. One of the last balloons we flew, once we got the data and sent it off, within the hour I think there was a tornado watch. ”

While weather balloons are just one way to gather data, their data can have a huge impact on the decisions that us meteorologists make.