Storm Chasing by Balloon
Flotillas Target Data-poor Areas to Improve Hurricane Forecasts

Katy Human
Earth System Research Laboratory
NOAA's Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research

January 15, 2009 — As Hurricane Paloma churned through the Caribbean south of Cuba in November 2008, four teams of NOAA-trained students and scientists got ready. In a carefully choreographed experiment, the teams released 57 superpressure balloons, from Florida, Mississippi, Barbados, and Puerto Rico.

The mylar balloons, three to five feet in diameter and pyramid-shaped, carried GPS units — and the high expectations of NOAA and Department of Homeland Security researchers.

“The purpose was to test the concept that long drift balloons could be used to report back data in real time from data-poor regions,” said Sandy MacDonald, director of NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory, who began laying plans in 2007 for the new research project, called WISDOM, or Weather In-Situ Deployment Optimization Method. 

Specifically, the WISDOM project seeks to improve the three- to seven-day predictions of Atlantic hurricane track and intensity by deploying balloon-borne instruments into data sparse regions of the atmosphere. The Department of Homeland Security has been involved in this effort due to its role in coordinating the national response to large-scale natural disasters.

With the 2008 hurricane season underway, DHS funded a pilot project. Justyna Nicinska, WISDOM project manager at NOAA headquarters, and ESRL’s Russ Chadwick quickly worked with Near Space Corporation and with Engenium Technologies Corporation to design the balloons/payload system and train meteorology students to release the devices.

In an October test run, students and staff released 19 balloons, which ESRL tracked in the atmosphere for up to two weeks. As Hurricane Paloma took shape in early November, the teams launched and tracked a flotilla of 57 more balloons.  

“We learned this is a viable method to obtain data,” Nicinska said in late November, as hurricane season wound down.

The superpressure balloons are not aimed at a hurricane itself, Nicinska said. Rather, they are targeted at atmospheric regions that a storm may pass through, where winds, temperature, and humidity can steer, strengthen, or weaken the hurricane. Today, scientists have only limited data on the atmosphere over oceans, Nicinska said, and sending a couple hundred or more instrument-bearing balloons into flight in advance of a threatening hurricane should, in theory, give researchers better information to forecast the storm’s behavior.

This year’s balloons carried only GPS units, but the WISDOM team also hopes to measure temperature and relative humidity in the future, and to send out many more balloons. Eventually, WISDOM data will be incorporated into forecasts of hurricane track and intensity, Chadwick said, but it will be several years until researchers understand the value of the new measurements.

“The key to making something work is to get data where there isn’t any,” Chadwick said. “WISDOM can do that, and therefore it should help.”

WISDOM Season One Stats: 140: number of superpressure balloons and GPS units built for WISDOM, including 10 prototypes. 78: number of balloons launched. 2 to 15: number of days individual balloons remained aloft. 20 to 25: People trained to release balloons, from students at the University of Miami, Mississippi State University, the Caribbean Institute of Meteorology and Hydrology, the Northern Gulf Institute, and NOAA staff in Puerto Rico.