How do weather balloons improve forecast accuracy?

AccuWeather's Ali Reid explores the science behind using weather balloons and how they help improve AccuWeather forecasting.

Transcript

00:00What if we told you that one of the most important tools for predicting storms is something that

00:04floats miles often above us, often unnoticed? Other than the two of us. That's true. Other

00:10than the two of us, that's right. We're pretty well grounded.

00:12Alan Reed shows us the high-flying science that helps keep you safer when severe weather strikes.

00:19It rises silently but carries data that can save lives. Every day, twice a day,

00:25weather balloons like this one are launched around the globe. Each one collects detailed

00:31readings like temperature, wind, humidity, and pressure. That helps us understand what the

00:36weather conditions are in that location and how that also may impact weather around that location

00:41throughout the rest of the day. Once the balloon reaches the upper atmosphere and bursts,

00:45a small instrument called a radiosonde transmits the data back down, creating a skew-t diagram of

00:52temperatures, moisture, wind speed, and direction. And that's plotted at every single height in the

00:56atmosphere from the surface all the way up to about 45,000 feet. These models are some of the

01:01most important tools our AccuWeather meteorologists use to forecast severe weather. We look at a couple

01:07different important factors when diagnosing severe thunderstorms. Wind shear, which is the change of

01:12wind direction. We can also easily tell how much instability there is in the atmosphere. One more

01:17important ingredient is the presence potentially of a cap in the atmosphere. And when a cap breaks,

01:22you can get significant rapidly evolving convection, in this case thunderstorms, that can cause severe

01:26weather. Weather balloons might seem old school, but they remain one of the most reliable tools

01:32for meteorologists. We combine all these different data sets, in this case really important weather

01:37balloon data from radiosonde to help inform us as meteorologists to make decisions about what the

01:43forecast should be, what warnings should be issued, so that people can then take action to keep

01:47them safe. For AccuWeather, I'm Allie Reed.