Here's how a global helium shortage could affect the quality of weather forecasts:
While casually browsing Twitter this weekend, I noticed a Tweet that may have been overlooked by many people. However, it immediately worried me. Theoffice tweeted, “Because of an ongoing helium shortage Chathams upper air soundings will limited to once a day at 12Z until further notice.” You might be asking what an “upper air sounding is and why is helium relevant.
Ingleborough Public School launches its own balloon hoping it will rise to 90,000 feet before bursting and allowing the payload, along for the ride, parachute back to ground. The kids can track the balloon in realtime with GPS on mobile devices and hope to find their experiment a couple hours after liftoff. The first attempt was stalled by trees about 200 yards away. After retrieval and some added helium, the balloon launched successfully. .
From weather balloon data, meteorologists can diagnose upper atmospheric conditions, identify jet stream patterns, wind shear, stability and so forth. This data, along with information from satellites and other data sources, initialize the computer models. This “starting point” for the atmosphere is important as complex equations are solved to forecast what that same atmosphere looks like 1, 3 or 7 days forward in time. That, in a nutshell folks, is how numerical weather prediction is done.
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