Matthew's Journal

We did a test balloon sounding launch today just before lunchtime to test the sounding equipment and familiarize some potential balloon launchers with the processes. Balloon soundings, for the unfamiliar, measure temperature, humidity, and winds with respect to height for a given location. The whole process is fairly straight forward. You prep the sonde, fill the balloon, attach the sonde to the balloon, and the hardest part, release the balloon in such a manner that it doesn't go flying into some part of the ship. If it's windy and the ship is moving fast, like it was today, this can be difficult. However, we had an incident free launch and we got good data back, a plot of which you can see below. By the way, if any one knows how to make a skew-T log-P plot in Excel please let me know how.

Data from the first VOCALS sounding.