BOISE, IDAHO — Did you know that two weather balloons are launched out of Boise every single day? 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...oh wait, it's just a balloon.
"Ultimately it brings our prediction apparatus back to reality. 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.
Top-secret? No. But highly-sophisticated and important? Absolutely. This is a weather balloon used by the NWS that's launched once at 4AM and once at 4PM, 365 days a year. It's just one of many to be launched worldwide at that exact time.
"In the U-S, it's about 90-plus sites in the U-S that are doing that. We've got about ten in the tropics and Bahamas area, and then the worldwide, I've been told it's 800-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.
"Once per second, that radio is broadcasting temperature, humidity, the GPS is telling us our wind speed and direction and it's location," said Hewko.
"And then we'll use that data for at least six hours, if not closer to twelve until we get another one up. 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.
Data that helps make predictions as accurate as possible.
"Those balloons are very important, they give us real, actual data as opposed to model data. Model data is an attempt to tell us what's coming, but the balloon tells us what's actually here right now," said Parker.
For example...
"The other day when we had very cold air in the valley, leading into the snow and then the freezing rain, the balloon was what told us how deep our cold air was, and exactly how cold it was, and that helped us change what the models were saying and hold onto that cold air here in the valley, which really helped us put out a better forecast," said Parker.
If everything went right with every single launch, they'd get 730 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.
"Right now you caught us at a good time. This is one of our milestones right now. And this actually is 400 millibar level, and I'll show you on this graphic here, you can see that the balloon has reached 400 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.
"Once the balloon bursts, it comes down at a rapid rate. You're still gonna get information, and that still might be usable in a sense, but the batteries on these will probably last about maybe 3-5 hours," said Hewko.
If you ever were to find one, we're told you can go ahead and keep it as a souvenir. But knowing that most will travel dozens of miles away and usually land harmlessly in unpopulated areas, don't worry.
"The material that they use is made to biodegrade as soon as possible and to be harmless to the environment," said Hewko.
So though they've been around well over 100 years now and may seem elementary to some, weather balloons continue to play a pivotal role in forecasting our local weather. And you'll continue to see them launched from right outside the Boise Airport for the foreseeable future.
"We keep coming up with better ways to continue to make good use of this data, and though there have been attempts to over the years to maybe say oh we don't really need this data anymore, we have airplanes that can give us this data, they haven't been able to get rid of the balloons yet because, at the end of the day, it's critical data that we need," said Parker.
For more information on the National Weather Service Forecast Office in Boise, click this link. Or to see the exact, real-time path the weather balloons that are launched out of Boise take, click this link.
