Something else to keep you awake at night

Sniff reluctantly models Tracker's treasure

I thought I was pretty cool because I found a perfectly sharp pencil during the last beach clean up, but Tracker has come up trumps this week. He presented a disturbing looking object to me which I presumed to be some sort of medical waste, but alas, it was a weather balloon. The pink stuff is the ginormous latex balloon and the white plastic box is the 'radiosonde'. This little thing gathers info about humidity, pressure, wind speed etc and sends it back to earth, thus forming the basis of our weather forecasting. The balloons are filled with hydrogen gas and fly up for a couple of hours to about 25km above earth til they burst and a cute little parachute slows their descent back to land, heaven forbid it should clobber someone on the head, more than likely it will end up in the sea to snarl and suffocate marine life or add to the unsightly mess on our coastlines. I did a bit of googling to find out about balloons, particularly in regard to the fact that they're creating a lot of rubbish, (yes yes i know they're necessary)I found bugger all info on this aspect so contacted Metservice for some more info and this is what they had to say...

Other technologies – particularly measurements from satellites and weather radars – also provide helpful information on upper atmosphere conditions, but cannot yet fully replace balloon soundings. Over the last 20 years Met Service has made some reductions in its balloon sounding programme – for example the Campbell Island station, which used to release 2 balloons a day, closed down in 1995. Because the soundings are very expensive (our current programme costs about one and a half million dollars a year to operate) we will make further reductions when we can, but I expect it will be many years before the worldwide programme of balloon releases ends altogether.

There are currently 8 sites around NZ that release in total, 18 balloons per day. By my calculations 18 x 365 days of the year = 6570 very large balloons and plastic boxes each year that mainly end up in the sea, that's just in 1 year and just little old NZ, aaarrgh. Another thing to keep me awake at night, just when I thought I'd got over the photos of the decomposed albatross chicks with their stomachs full of plastic. One would think that Metservice could take some initiative to remedy the eco-trash their work creates. Maybe helping clean up our ocean & coastlines?

Click on the link below to see a picture of a weather balloon being released.
http://www.odt.co.nz/the-regions/central-otago/81532/jet-mission-measure-global-greenhouse-gases