NWS Weather Balloon lands in Champaign

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. (WCIA) – Every day, twice a day, the National Weather Service Office in Lincoln launches Weather Balloons, once in the morning and once in the evening.

Those weather balloons have small instrument attached to them called a radiosonde.

Last year, we took you to a weather balloon launch at the National Weather Service, but today we were able to be on the receiving end of things.

That instrument can measure relative humidity, temperature, wind speed & direction and pressure in the atmosphere as it rises up, giving meteorologists a real-time look into what the conditions of the atmosphere are doing.

Attached to the devices is also a GPS transmitter which helps to track the device.

Local weather observer Stan Olson first noticed the balloon had landed by Parkland College and messaged us about it.

We were able to go to the scene and recover the balloon. It was found with the parachute and burst balloon in the top of a tree on the southside of campus, with the radiosonde hanging above the ground by a few feet, attached to a very long string.

This particular weather balloon took it on a journey from Lincoln to Champaign, and went over 114,000 feet into the atmosphere.

Below is a graphic called a “Skew-T” that plots the data as the radiosonde rises. It shows little saturation in the atmosphere, which is visible to us in the form of no clouds. It also shows a thin layer of air close to the ground being saturated with a light wind, a typical set-up for fog to form, which it did for some of us locally.

In addition, most of the atmospheric flow is moving west-to-east with a west wind, and overall fairly light. We don’t have any active weather systems moving through, and we also sit straight east of Lincoln, helping to bring the weather balloon into Champaign as it went up, popped and fell back to the earth with the aid of a parachute attached to the device.

It is estimated that only one out of every five weather balloons is actually recovered. 91 observation stations around the United States launch weather balloons twice a day as part of a global network of weather observers.

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