Weather Balloon

I got up early this morning (well 7:30, it's early enough) to go and observe Rob launching a weather balloon. This is done twice a week by Matt or Rob at the same time as other weather balloons are released all over the world, thus gaining beakers world-wide enourmous amounts of data about what's going on up there (the word beaker is frequently used to refer to 'scientists', presumably because we work with glass beakers full of exciting chemicals all the time and the scientist in the muppets was also called Beaker) . It was a gorgeous morning, we're still not seeing the sun above the mountains yet but we do get sunrises and sunsets which last for hours which are brilliant and truly stunning.

The huge latex balloon gets filled with helium and the instrument (which sends back information on atmospheric pressure, temperature and humidity) is attached to it. Then it is taken outside and released..... As the balloon climbs higher and higher it gets bigger and bigger -apparently it gets to the size of a double decker bus by which time the balloon is only one molecule thick, it then bursts - that would be amazing to see but sadly it's about 30km up by then.