Students in the Concord school system launch weather balloons each year to learn about project design and development, collaboration and, of course, the atmosphere. Since 2017 this annual project / event has been led by Ms. Elizabeth King, who is the teacher for high-ability students at Concord Ox-Bow. Here’s coverage, including pictures and video, from the 2023 launch: wsbt.com.
The balloons are purchased as kits from High Altitude Science with a platform to carry an instrument payload including sensors for GPS, temperature and pressure.
IUSB professors Brian Davis, Ilan Levine and Henry Scott, all of whom are working together on collaborative environmental data collection, reached out to Ms. King earlier this year with a request to learn more about the launches and to ask if they could become involved. After some preliminary planning via video conference, Prof. Davis made two visits to Ms. King’s class and built two Arduino-based dataloggers: one for each balloon planned for launch on May 19, 2023. Data from the IUSB loggers will largely provide redundancy for this year, but they are readily customizable and can easily add additional sensors for future launches.
Both balloons launched successfully about 30 minutes apart from each other and reached heights of 78,000′ and 88,000′, respectively, before popping and falling back to Earth. There was a strong westerly wind at the time of launch; the first balloon fell near the IN / MI border, and the second landed in Lake Erie.
At this point it is not yet clear if the balloon that landed in Lake Erie will be retrievable, but we’ll post a follow up once we have data from either or both dataloggers.
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