Weather Ballons

Looks like we'll have a near carbon copy forecast for today and Tuesday for the most part. Mostly sunny and warm, the above normal trend continues and so will the dry weather. This is the Bufkit program and a look at future forecast soundings. Now these "soundings" are a picture of what the entire atmosphere looks like from the ground all the way up into the stratosphere. The red line is a typical plot of average global temperatures and where they are in relation to every layer of the atmosphere. The way meteorologists know all this information is from weather balloons...And not the type associated with the Balloon Boy fiasco. The National Weather Service launches weather balloons twice a day from many different locations around the US.
See that little package at the bottom of the balloon that I circled? That's actually a pretty technologically advance parcel, fully equip with temperature, pressure and wind speed and direction sensors along with a device to send the information back to the National Weather Service station that released the balloon. The data from this balloon gives us a snapshot of what the atmosphere looks like at the time the balloon was released. This leads us back to that idea of a "sounding" or a "Skew-T diagram"(it's called a Skew-T because temperatures are actually plotted skewed or along a diagonal instead of plotted vertically) Here's the one from the Aberdeen office that was launched this morning:

There's a whole lot of information on this picture and all of it was gathered from the balloon they launched this morning, some of the data has been manipulated with calculations based on the data, but overall, a very useful item in forecasting. Only 2 NWS sites in South Dakota launch these balloons: the Aberdeen and Rapid City offices, you can check other sites around the country here. Here's a quick overview, from Unisys of what some of the lines on these diagrams show:

"A Skew T plot is a standard plot used by meteorologists to analyze data from a balloon sounding. This is a plot of temperature with height as denoted by pressure. The pressure lines are plotted horizontally in blue and are also on an inverse log scale. The concept of Skew T means that the temperature is not plotted vertically but angles off to the right at a 45 degree angle. The temperature lines of the Skew T are in blue. The green lines are called dry adiabats. The light blue dashed lines are saturation adiabats. The yellow dashed lines are lines of constant mixing ratio. The sounding is plotted as two white lines. The right line is the temperature profile. The left line is the dewpoint profile. The winds are plotted as wind barbs with height (see below) on the right edge of the plot. "

I'll go into detail on how these soundings can help us forecast tomorrow... that is unless Cody steals that from me ;)

Enjoy the warm weather... sorry snow lovers, Mother Nature won't be helping you out much for some time.

~KDLT Meteorologist Jesse Ritka