Elyria Schools identifies wayward weather balloon found during eclipse

Elyria Schools personnel have identified the source of a weather balloon that was discovered on school property after Monday's total solar eclipse. Amy Higgins, director of communications and organizational strategy for Elyria Schools, said on Thursday that she identified the balloon as being part of the Nationwide Eclipse Ballooning Project. Specifically, the balloon originated from a team out of the University of Wyoming. The project included 53 teams made up of more than 700 students from 75 colleges and universities. Each team launched weather balloons along the path of totality before, during and after the total solar eclipse. The mission of the project was to collect atmospheric data between April 7 and April 8 and to investigate how the eclipse may have affected those conditions. The balloon discovered on Elyria Schools property was launched by a University of Wyoming team called the UW Space Cowboys. Higgins said the balloon the district now has was found on Monday on the property of the school's Eastern Heights campus by a parent who had been watching the eclipse there. The balloon was handed over to the district on Tuesday. Phil Bergmaier, who leads Space Cowboys and is a member of the university's atmospheric science program, said Thursday that the latex balloons his team launched contain packages of sensors that measure atmospheric conditions such as temperature, wind speed and humidity. "We can take all that and, after the project is over, analyze the data and put together a picture of what exactly the eclipse caused," Bergmaier said. "One of the big hopes of the project is to see if we can detect something called gravity waves." Gravity waves, Bergmaier said, are different from the more commonly known idea of gravitational waves. In the atmosphere, gravity waves are vertical waves of air that work similarly to ripples on a disturbed pond. "That same kind of thing happens in the atmosphere when you have certain kinds of disturbances," Bergmaier said. "… One of the questions is, does the eclipse shadow cause these ripples to form? That's just one of the scientific questions we're trying to examine." Bergmaier's team sent up one balloon every hour, starting on April 7, from the campus of Bluffton University in Bluffton, Ohio. The Space Cowboys were one of two teams involved in the project to launch from Ohio, as another team from Eastern Michigan University was based in Findlay. Bergmaier said the balloons are made of latex and pop upon reaching a certain height in the atmosphere. He said the team has heard about three of its balloons so far, and he expects to hear about more as many of them probably went down over Greater Cleveland. Balloons do not need to be recovered because they broadcast information back to the launch team in real time, and their tracking signal is mostly lost when they cross the horizon. The package attached to the balloon identifies it as being a part of the program and launched by the Space Cowboys team and encourages the finders to either keep it, discard it or send it back to the team to be reused. "We are fairly new to this, so we haven't set up a great system yet for people to send them back free of charge," Bergmaier said. "But if people want to ship them back on their own, we will gladly take them back and use them for something in the future." These weather balloons and their sensors are not cheap, he said, but science teams do not have the time and resources to collect them all. "That's just kinda the way it works in the name of science, to be able to collect data efficiently," Bergmaier said. "Because otherwise, we'd spend the vast majority of our time driving around looking for these things." If people want to send them back, the team will reuse them, but Bergmaier said anyone is free to keep balloons as a unique souvenir of the eclipse. But even if residents plan to keep a balloon, Bergmaier asked them to call and report its discovery. "A very large chunk of the Nationwide Eclipse Ballooning Project's focus is on outreach," Bergmaier said. "So we are always excited to talk with the community about what we're doing. We actually had quite a few visitors come up to watch our launches and we loved it. So anytime someone finds (a balloon) and wants to know more about what we're doing, I'm more than happy to reach out and share what information I have." He said that each package attached to the balloon has a serial number, and he can tell callers exactly when it was launched and what data it collected. The Nationwide Eclipse Ballooning Project operates during both total and annular solar eclipses and has been doing so since 2017. The project is supported by NASA's Science Mission Directorate Science Activation program and NASA's Space Grant College and Fellowship program. Bergmaier said researchers will begin going through the data collected this week, and readers curious to learn more should visit eclipse.montana.edu. Another weather balloon Lorain County residents have been asked to keep an eye out for was one launched Monday by students from the University of Purdue Fort Wayne. The Lorain Port and Finance Authority announced on Facebook that the weather balloon was last located by GPS over Lake Erie north of Lorain. The post said the balloon is believed to have landed in the lake at around 5:40 p.m. Monday. "(The launch team) know this is a long shot but they're asking those in the Lorain area if anyone had found or heard of someone that might have found the payloads that had been attached," the post read. Contact Owen MacMillan at (440) 329-7123 or omacmillan@chroniclet.com.