While waiting for shipping documents, we were invited by Kate Thompson to watch a weather balloon launch which is part of the ARM research project site in the Houston area.
The Scientific Site is moving in October out to La Jolla. CA for the next campaign. The sites move to areas of needed data collection.
This Houston (La Porte, Guy and Pearland) site is called TRACER and you can learn more about it here.
https://www.arm.gov/research/campaigns/amf2021tracer
The weather balloons are launched every 4 hours. Our friend Kate is the Logistics coordinator here. There are over 100 instruments at the sites with many universities running data collection for many research projects.
Mark, the meteorologist on site explained that weather balloons are an old data collection method that will not be replaced. It’s the only way to collect real time data for pressure, humidity, and altitude which can then be associated with data collected by other instruments on site to expand research for meteorological studies like aerosols, weather, and behavior of the atmosphere in general.
Butte Family Abroad 