Up, Up, and Away With Weather Balloons

By Erica McNamee of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD  As a kid, you were always taught to hold tight to balloons—tie them around your wrist, even, to keep them close. This week, a group of a dozen undergraduate students participating in NASA’s 2026 Student Airborne Research Program (SARP), unlearned old balloon-wrangling habits—and let go.  Their purpose:  to collect data about the atmosphere with the help of a weather balloon. For this fieldwork day, in a windy area on the Texas Gulf Coast, the group released an ozonesonde, a small instrument attached to a weather balloon that measures ozone concentrations as it rises through the atmosphere.    “I’ve never done any atmospheric fieldwork outside like this, so this has been an awesome new opportunity for me,” said Marin Stevens, SARP intern and chemistry student from the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs.   With the support of program mentors and faculty, and aboard the University of Houston’s Mobile Air Quality Laboratory (MAQL), the SARP interns participated in every step of the process.   The Mobile Air Quality Laboratory (MAQL) stands ready for some fieldwork. NASA/Erica McNamee Let’s set the scene: About 45 minutes away from this year’s SARP home base at the Lone Star Flight Museum in Houston, the MAQL drove down the Texas City Dike, a long strip of land jutting into the Texas Gulf Coast—an open space perfect for releasing the weather balloon. Among the 45 total students in the program, this group was assigned to meet the mobile lab at the balloon release location at  8 a.m. Central Time, just after a rainstorm rolled through.  Inside the lab, the students prepared ozonesondes for takeoff, completing the final steps that include measuring and pipetting cathode and anode solutions into the instrument cells attached to the sensor and testing each instrument’s response and baseline.  Outside the mobile laboratory, gusts of wind made it difficult to keep the balloon still while it was being filled with helium. Four students donned leather gloves to minimize oils from their fingers touching the balloon, which can make it pop faster after deployment. They wrangled the balloon while faculty advisor Travis Griggs, instructional assistant professor of atmospheric science from the University of Houston, filled it.   SARP students prepare the weather balloon for takeoff by filling it up with helium, while making sure it doesn’t pop or fly away. NASA/Sofie Bates Five students worked together to keep the balloon from flying away as they strung it to the ozonesonde, protected in a small foam container.  After confirming the launch location, time, and expected flight path with the Federal Aviation Administration (just a phone call away), it was time to set the weather instrument free.    Even though it’s hard to see, there’s a tiny dot up in the sky—that’s the weather balloon! These students are admiring their work, watching their science experiment float up into the atmosphere to collect data. NASA/Sofie Bates “It was like a fight to stay on the ground, with the balloon whipping around in the wind,” said Zayna Haider, SARP intern and atmospheric and climate science student from the University of Washington. “It just flew away as soon as we let it go.”  But the work had only just begun. The students huddled back inside the MAQL, monitoring data as long as the balloon kept sending it—until it popped or landed, whichever came first. Throughout the day, they repeated this process with two other balloons.   Students inside the Mobile Air Quality Laboratory reviewed the data from the weather balloon they had just launched. NASA/Erica McNamee This day gave many SARP participants, just starting their science careers, their first glimpse at hands-on fieldwork that reached the edges of the atmosphere. Next, they would use this data and what they learned from the experience for their end-of-internship research presentation.   “This is beyond what I ever thought it could be,” Stevens said. “I’m super excited for the next seven weeks.”  The post Up, Up, and Away With Weather Balloons  appeared first on NASA Science.