Comment by shagie
10 months ago
I believe it is along the line of...
Pull up https://www.pivotalweather.com/model.php?m=nam&p=sfct-mean-i... and pick some point (note the 'click for point sounding'). You can see the wind direction at that location as a function of altitude.
Using this as a vector field, you can do "the balloon is here now, 30 minutes from now it will be there, if it is at altitude Z at that time, it will be follow the wind in this direction" which in turn allows you to predict where it will be in 30 minutes and take the forecast for that location at that time and determine what altitude you want to be at.
Saying I want it to be at X,Y at some time is solving this backwards. Which isn't necessarily easy, but it's computable.
Pretty much this. We add the data the balloons themselves are collecting to make things more precise as well
Digging into it a little bit more...
The Balloon Learning Environment https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.01173
Chasing the citations from those papers to previous works can provide a fairly deep rabbit hole of things to read.