Forecasting the weather is tricky business. You need a lot of information. While surface observations can get us a lot of data, we still need information about what is happening far into the atmosphere to make meaningful models and predictions. Thats where weather balloons come in. This week we talk about how upper air observation works as well as Jupiter’s atmosphere on Fun Paper Friday!

Weather balloons

• Pilot Balloons
• Real Time Sounding Data
• Hodograph
• Skew-T
• Tephigram
• Stuve diagram
• High altitude research balloons
• Near space hobbyists
• NOAA Radiosonde Fact Sheet
• GPS occultation to measure atmospheric profiles
• NOAA Weather Balloon History
• Weird Al - EBay (YouTube)

Contest

Write us a geoscience themed limerick! This is a family show, so remember…nothing that rhymes with “Nantucket” Please email us your limericks by August 12, 2016 and we’ll be judging them along with Dr. Katie Schearer, an english professor. The prize? One of the awesome creations from Chris at Taylor Custom. Thanks for listening everyone!

John’s Example Lymerick

The stress the fault is feeling Built up by plates never healing Energy release is due Too much strain cannot accrue The rock will soon be yielding

Fun Paper Friday

• Why is Jupiter so hot? Turns out we didn’t know until recently.
• O’Donoghue, J., Moore, L., Stallard, T. S., & Melin, H. (n.d.). Heating of Jupiter’s upper atmosphere above the Great Red Spot. Nature Communications, advance online publication SP - EP . http://doi.org/10.1038/nature18940

Contact us

Show - www.dontpanicgeocast.com - SWUNG Slack - @dontpanicgeo - [email protected]

John Leeman - www.johnrleeman.com - @geo_leeman

Shannon Dulin - @ShannonDulin