This Short Stuff episode explains weather balloons, the inexpensive workhorses of meteorology that have been launched routinely for most of a century. Josh and Chuck describe the radiosonde carried aloft, which measures temperature, humidity and air pressure with simple instruments and relays the readings to the ground by radio before the balloon bursts.
They explain why high-altitude data helps forecasters spot developing storms, how the balloons are filled with helium or hydrogen, and why discarded radiosondes end up as litter. The episode also recounts Larry Walters's 1982 lawn chair flight, a reminder of how little the balloons were designed to carry people.
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Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's sitting in for Dave. And this is a good old-fashioned, straight-ahead Stuff You Should Know Short Stuff about something kind of science-y, but also just really interesting in a bunch of different ways. So let's go.
So maybe you've walked outside of your house, or maybe you're on a hike through the woods in the wilderness nearby, and you've come across this weird synthetic, uh, burst rubber balloon laying on the ground.
Are you talking to me?
Yes, you.
Oh, well, no, I haven't.
All right. That settles that.
Okay.
But let's say you had. There's a very good chance that could be a weather balloon.
Yeah. I wish I had. I would love to have an anecdote about that, but I don't.
Are you waiting?
Are you talking to me? Yeah, Chuck.
Okay.
I've never actually seen a weather balloon in person.
Uh, that's what we're talking about, weather balloons. And I'm surprised we haven't covered this. These are kind of cool and kind of a perfect Short Stuff, I think.
Right. So, um, let's talk about these things, because they're the workhorse of weather, and they really are just a couple of, um, couple of components, like a handful of components that gets launched. Um, well, I guess let's talk about the components. The big one is the balloon, but the balloon is really just kind of the dumbest part of the whole thing, because the balloon is there to carry a box called a radio sond, or a radio sonde, uh, in French.
Yeah.
It's about the size of a shoebox. It doesn't say what size shoebox. I mean, like, you know, Gary Coleman's shoebox and Shaquille O'Neal's shoeboxes were different sizes, so they didn't get specific enough for my tastes.
I knew you were going to say Shaquille O'Neal, by the way.
He has big feet, man.
Yeah, he does.
Um, and these shoeboxes, whichever size they are, they have got three really rudimentary crude atmospheric instruments, but that's, it turns out, all you really need for these things.
That's right. Uh, they have something called a thermistor. That is a little ceramic metal rod, and it is a thermometer. Uh, they have a hydristor. Is that how you pronounce it?
Hyghristor? Yeah.
All right. One of the two. Soft G or hard G? We're not sure. Uh, that is a humidity sensor. Um, it's got a slide with a film of lithium chloride on it, and it reads humidity through electrical resistance. Yeah. What else you got?
The aneroid barometer. Aneroid barometer.
Uh-huh.
So it measures air pressure because there's like a trigger that changes as the air pressure around it changes, and it's allowed to kind of expand. And that's a big part of, um, weather balloons as a concept. The fact that the air pressure way up high where they go, and they go really high, changes has kind of worked into the design of how these things work.
Yeah. And there's a fourth thing. To me, the most important thing. Actually, they all work together because they're all super important. Uh, and they, you know, if one of these is gone, well, actually, if the thermometer was gone, you just wouldn't know the temperature, and you could still know the humidity and the, uh, air pressure, right?
Sure. I guess so.
I'm being silly. What I'm saying is, there's a transmitter up there, you guys. There's a radio transmitter, and it relays this information down to the ground. And the reason why that's important is because these balloons go up, up, up, up, up, and they get bigger and bigger and bigger until they're, I think they're about five feet in diameter when they start.
Yeah.
By the time they get up to their dying point, they can be as big as a moving truck, and those things burst, and everything crashes down to the ground. Uh, there is a little parachute.
Yeah.
That engages to take that radio sonde down to the ground gently, but they're not counting on finding that thing because that data has been transmitted back already.
Exactly. And that's what makes it so much more, um, advantageous than what they were using back in the '20s and '30s, which is like kites.
Yeah.
Or maybe a plane. You had to wait until the kite got real back in or the plane landed to get the data you needed to start doing calculations. This is, you know, almost real-time data. I say we take a break and we come back and talk about, um, weather balloon launches and some of the other things about weather balloons.
Let's do it.
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Okay, Chuck, so there's some pretty neat stuff about weather balloons that we haven't even begun to touch on, right?
Yeah.
One of the first things is how high up they go. They go up to what's known as the stratosphere, which is the second-to-last layer before you hit outer space. Second-to-last atmospheric layer before you hit outer space. And that's something like 18 miles, I think. Did you say that when you talked about it swelling up to the size of a truck?
Yeah. I mean, that's about the distance that it can go before you're in danger of rupturing.
Yeah. And I mean, like, it's close to the edge of space. Tristan Hopper, the House of Works writer who wrote this, pointed out that, um, like, if the weather balloon had eyes and a brain and all that, I'm adding that part. And it looked up, it'd be the blackness of outer space, but if it looked down, it'd see the blue sky below it. So it's up there, and it's pretty amazing. And then it pops and dies, and the radio sond comes back to the ground. Um, and because these things work so well, because they're so actually cheap to do, I think it's like a few hundred dollars to release one, which compared to other techniques like a rocket launch or even an airplane ride.
Yeah.
It's very cheap. And so much so that they, um, release these things a couple of times a day to the tune of like 67, 68 thousand a year just in the United States.
Yeah. Uh, they have 92 weather stations that they do those a couple a day, and they've been doing this for many, many decades. Uh, when they first figured this out, they've been doing it since then. And there are more than 900 weather stations, uh, I think all over the world, like you said, that are doing this kind of thing. And the balloon itself, um, is neoprene. It's a synthetic rubber. Uh, it's filled with either helium or hydrogen, depending on, uh, you know, which, uh, big gas you're in bed with. Uh, hydrogen is cheaper. Uh, it can lift a little bit better, and it's more easily extracted from water, but it's really flammable.
Yeah.
Uh, as you can recall from the, uh, Hindenburg episode.
Yeah.
So a lot of those things have exploded, so a lot of people will go with helium instead. Um, but like you said, they're cheap. So they've been doing this, uh, with weather balloons for a long time. And the advantage, obviously, is that, you know, you're high up there. I know you said they used kites before to predict the weather, but the other thing they did was use their eyeballs and would lick their finger and hold it up in the air.
Yeah. This is a big point about weather balloons. The reason that they let them go up so high, or they want them to go up so high, is that you can really tell a lot more about weather at higher altitudes than you can from the ground, because it might look at like a nice sunny day here on Earth, uh, but then just, you know, a couple tens of thousands of feet up in the air, there's like some disturbance in the forest growing that's going to turn into a major thunderstorm that's going to produce a tornado that's going to kill a bunch of people.
So if you have data about those things that are starting to form, you can predict what's going to happen and warn people with way more time than you could just from making ground-based observations. So that's another reason why they're so relied on, is that all you need are these cheap instruments that are designed to basically just fall back to Earth and be forgotten about.
Yeah.
Um, and you can save, you know, lives of people from the information they're relaying back.
Yeah, for sure. It's kind of one of those just low-fi solutions that helps. Uh, if you think like, oh, wait, what happens here? These things just fall out in the woods like you were talking about, uh, or maybe hit somebody in the head.
Yeah.
Um, thankfully, I don't think that's happened yet, but they do become litter, uh, which is kind of the downer of all this. You know, they can travel hundreds of miles if they're in a good wind current, and they can land anywhere, basically. Uh, I think, you know, the idea of trying to send people out or trucks out or helicopters out to go retrieve these is that defeats the purpose of these being cheap. But, and this is a very cool, to me, the fact of the show.
Yeah.
Is if you come across one of those radio sonds, it comes with a postage paid envelope, and you can put that thing inside, an old weather balloon, and mail it back to the National Weather Service, and they'll send it back up again.
They do. They send it back up, and then they send you a junior weather service operator's, um, t-shirt.
Do they really?
No.
Oh, God. They should.
They should, because I'm sure they get so few back that you could do that kind of thing, you know?
I got a new life goal, man. I want to find one of these one day.
Awesome. Maybe it's like, um, the Nielsen people, and they send you like three $1 bills back.
Yeah. Uh, before we close, I think we have to mention, just to keep from getting emails, we got to mention the, uh, the lawn chair guy.
Oh, for sure. Larry Walters.
I think we talked about him in maybe the Ig Nobel Awards. We may have, but we got to mention him again here.
Okay. So he was a truck driver who in 1982 decided that he wanted to float from Los Angeles over to the Rocky Mountains. He said, well, weather balloons work pretty well. I'm going to attach 42 of them to my lawn chair and see what happens. And he did this. He actually did. He lifted off, and things were going well for the first like minute or two.
Yeah. Uh, he, you know, I guess he didn't do the math, or maybe that just wasn't his strong point, but.
He did Josh math.
He ended up at 16,000 feet. And I know they made a movie about this, which I'm sure was portrayed as a lot of laughs, but, uh, or maybe not, but I can't imagine anything more terrifying than being 16,000 feet above the air.
No.
And realizing like, wow, I've really gotten in over my head here.
And this was July of 1982, so he wasn't dressed for 16,000 feet either, which is very chilly, right?
That's a good point. Yeah.
Yeah. So this was not a great experience for him. Luckily, even though he hadn't done the math correctly or at all, he did have the foresight to bring an air gun with him so that he could shoot out some of the balloons or all of them and land safely. So he just shot out some of the weather balloons, I guess, a little earlier than he expected to, and he landed gently back in somebody's backyard in Long Beach, probably snoop dogs.
Could you, have you seen pictures of this guy?
No.
Flying over Los Angeles?
No, I haven't.
All right. I'm going to send you a picture. It's incredible looking. It looks exactly like you think it would, yet it's still mind-blowing.
Did he have like a seatbelt on the lawn chair, or is it just him sitting in a lawn chair?
It's hard to tell, but it looks, I mean, if you zoom in, unless this is a fake picture, I wonder if this is fake.
Oh, yeah. Who's that?
Because it looks like a guy sitting there watching the game with a beer in his hand. But that might have been the case.
Maybe. Maybe.
All right. I'm going to send it to you either way. I'll send it to you and Jerry right now.
If I had done this and I reached 16,000 feet, you would know that I was coming because you would just hear my scream getting louder and louder, and it'd just be incessant and nonstop. And you would never be able to get me to let go of the lawn chair because I'd be out of my mind, dissociated somewhere else, and it would just be a bad scene, I think.
Yeah. I think the movie scene, it would just, it would show someone like in an outdoor cafe, and they're just like, they put their fork down and like, what am I hearing in the distance? And then it just gets louder, and then everyone's looking up. And it's not Superman.
Uh, also, speaking of dissociation, uh, I actually dissociated earlier in this episode when you were making your joke.
Which one?
The one about, um, the most important component.
Oh, okay. All right.
So that's why you didn't get a very good, um, uh, laugh out of me, because I was out of my body for a second.
Hey, man, you don't have to explain anything to me. After 18 years, all is forgiven on both of our accounts, right?
Thank you. Yes.
Okay, good.
I just made the symbol of the cross with my two fingers.
All right. I'm sure that means something.
Okay, well, that's it for Short Stuff. So what does that mean, Chuck?
It's out.
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Weather balloons are the workhorse of the meteorological world, which is why they’ve been used daily around the world for most of a century. Let’s salute these unsung heroes of weather prediction by getting to know them better.
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