Comment by ramonyc
10 months ago
Neat :) I'm involved in a few projects focused on vertical profiling in the coastal urban boundary layer.
I saw in a response you said the balloons will periodically return to sea level and ascend (which sounds like a fun design challenge by itself.) Will you be doing so near populated areas as well?
Good luck!
Very interesting, I'd love to hear more about it! In short, yes, we plan to do descents near urban areas if there's a route where we can go down to a safe height and stay away from any airspace. What cities are you looking at right now?
Most recently Houston had a large ARM field campaign which brought together a lot of atmospheric scientists from around the country. (https://www.arm.gov/research/campaigns/amf2021tracer)
ARM is a DOE program that ships top-tier instrumentation to various sites around the world. Loads of university researchers will follow, and you end up with a massive open source data pool. Houston in particular was focused on Aerosol effects on precipitation in the Coastal-Urban environment. There were loads of balloon launches from sites all over the city during the campaign, from large ozonesondes to the tiny sparv embedded foam cup ones (https://sparvembedded.com/products/windsond)
I'm in NY, and my university NOAA department has a focus on PBL Ozone measurements lately. My work in particular is focused on low cost UAV profiling up to about 150m, with a pipe dream of doing 0-3km.
I'm just a grad student, but if anything there sounds interesting feel free to email and I can try and get you in touch with more knowledgeable people.