St. Louis U. High’s Environmental STEM class, taught by science teacher Bill Anderson, launched their annual weather balloon this past Tuesday. The balloon provided great data and photos alike before coming down in Illinois.

“Big picture is we’re looking at climate, and climate change,” said Anderson. “Climate is long-term patterns, primarily temperature and precipitation. Weather is on a given day.”

By sending out a weather balloon to take data on the wind speed, temperature, pressure, weather, among other variables each summer and winter, long term patterns in weather can be tracked and more accurately examine the climate of the area and how it’s changing over time.

“The longer we do this, the better our data gets, because it gives us more data points to look for trends,” said Anderson. “When we send up the balloon, we measure temperature, pressure, the percent of oxygen, the relative humidity and UVA, and we will also get wind speed, and altitude, obviously, because we’re trying to see how all of those variables change with altitude.”

However, great results didn’t happen effortlessly. Setting up the weather balloon takes lots of time before each launch.

“They spent a couple of weeks writing Python code for the Raspberry Pi cameras that we send, we send three cameras and the pictures they get are really, really cool,” said Anderson. “So, they spent quite a bit of time learning how to write Python code, and get cameras to do what they wanted, because each camera captures pictures at a different rate.”

“In the weeks leading up to the launch, we assembled the payload of cameras, sensors, trackers, and other stuff as well as programmed the different cameras,” said senior Charlie Dougherty. “The programming was done in Python on a Raspberry Pi, and it was extremely fun to do.” 

After all the programming, the class spent a few days putting the actual balloon together, fastening all the instruments onto the frame securely. Once the day of the launch came around, new batteries were installed in all of the equipment and cameras were powered on before making a few last minute attachments to the frame and carrying it outside for launch.

“We attached the balloon … to the parachute then the parachute to the payload,” said Anderson. “There were several days for them to start practicing how to tie knots. Then we inflated the balloon and let it go, and it goes where it goes. We’ve got software that does a pretty good job of predicting its flight, and then the trackers that we put on it, there’s three trackers, follow it much more closely.”

“Launching the balloon is one of my favorite days of the year,” said Director of IT Jon Dickmann. “It's just a ton of fun to see the culmination of all of our work.”

This year, the weather was in favor of the group as they were able to efficiently send the balloon up and follow it along its path.

“The winds were really calm, so it went up really slowly,” said Dickman. “We got some nice shots of the campus. It kind of hung out over Forest Park for a while.”

The balloon works by being filled with helium in order to rise to a certain point until there is as little pressure in the air as necessary for the balloon to pop, because gasses such as helium expand when under lower pressure, stretching and eventually popping the balloon, which can grow to about 20 times its size on the ground. 

“It was really fun doing the launch, all the work so far with coding and then assembling the package with data collectors seeing that come to fruition,” said senior Joe Mannello. “I know the anticipation for the launch was growing substantially every day we got closer so it was quite fulfilling to see our work succeed.”

“It was a very interesting and fun experience,” said senior Gavin Moyich. “We all had our jobs on the day of the launch to make the launch go as smoothly as possible. I had the job of helping blow up the actually balloon.”

As the balloon drifted, Anderson and Dickmann tracked the balloon’s path and followed it to Highland, Illinois. Because the wind was still affecting the balloon, the team had to do a little backtracking and back backtracking to ensure they were in the right spot for it to come down, but eventually it floated down on parachute and was able to be collected all in one piece.

“The guys this year did an exceptionally good job with their organization, like when we’re outside. So everybody has a job, and they were right on it, on task, everything went real smooth,” said Anderson. “And it took off without a hitch, so yeah they did good.”