PHNOM PENH: Rubber is at the heart of both climate change measurement and its generation. Weather forecasting remains most accurate when using a latex weather balloon. Tyres and deforestation to produce these tyres are at the heart of the problem.
Weather balloon story "Upper air measurement" from Engineering News (South Africa).
It may seem odd, and a little old-fashioned, that the world’s most sophisticated and accurate in situ upper-air weather-measurement device is borne aloft by, of all things, a latex rubber balloon. But there is nothing old-fashioned about the performance that Vaisala Radiosonde RS92 delivers to Finnish national weather services and other meteorological organisations worldwide.
The most valuable data for meteorologists and meteorological researchers is that generated in situ, at the very heart of weather phenomena.
And the most practical and cost- effective way to lift a radiosonde into the atmosphere, where it can measure these phenomena, is a good old latex rubber balloon.
This is as true today – when Vaisala radiosonde technology has become one of the high-tech cornerstones of modern meteorological measurement – as it was when Professor Vitho Vaisala, a mathematician and meteorologist and the inventor of a number of meteorological instruments, intro- duced his first commercial radiosonde back in 1936.
The atmospheric data gathered by Vaisala radiosondes is a key input for the forecasting and climate change monitoring carried out by many of the world’s national weather services.
It is also used to calibrate some of the most technologically sophisticated equipment on earth – and beyond. Radiosonde data is used, for example, to calibrate equipment aboard satellites, measuring such things as the radiation emanating from the earth’s surface.
Scientists conducting meteorological research, as well as meteoro- logists working for national weather services, require very different things of their measuring equipment, but one thing they all want, and expect, is accuracy. And that is what the Vaisala Radiosonde RS92 provides.
Its unrivalled measurement accuracy has propelled its rise to become the world’s acknowledged gold standard in upper-air weather observation.
The data that it generates during its ascent into the upper atmosphere covers pressure, temperature (as low as –90 degrees Celsius at high altitudes), and relative humidity measurments, all of which are transmitted to receiving equipment on the ground, in the form of the Vaisala Digi-CORA Sounding System MW31.
Thorough testing of the RS92 radiosonde, in combination with the Digi-CORA Sounding System MW31, by the World Meteoro-logical Organisa- tion (WMO) on the island of Mauritius, in February 2005, together with acceptance tests carried out by Vaisala customers worldwide, has shown that the RS92 offers the world’s highest level of PTU measurement performance and continuous wind data availability.
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