Lost over North Las Vegas: weather balloon, probably popped

I’m a white helium-filled latex balloon wearing an orange parachute, although by now, I’ve probably popped.

I was sent up into the air around 4 p.m. Monday near Dean Martin Drive and Blue Diamond Road on a quest to measure temperature, humidity and air pressure in Las Vegas.

My parents last received a signal from me at around 105,000 feet near the North Las Vegas Airport, where they believe I exploded and fell back down to earth.

“Based on wind pattern, we can guess it’s somewhere in the north valley,” National Weather Service meteorologist Ashley Wolf said at noon on Tuesday. “So far we have not heard from anybody who has specifically seen our balloon.”

At launch, the weather balloon is anywhere between 5 and 6 feet in diameter. But, meteorologist Chesea Kryston has said, by the time it pops, it could be “about the size of a small house.”

The weather service’s Las Vegas office is one of about 90 sites across the U.S. that release weather balloons twice a day — once at 4 a.m. and again at 4 p.m.

“We do this because weather doesn’t just happen on the surface,” Wolf said. “And unfortunately there are not a lot of other ways to get a vertical observation of the weather.”

According to Wolf, nationwide, two-thirds of the weather service’s balloons are never located. But over the years, the instruments have been redesigned to be more environmentally friendly. The current design, for example, uses less styrofoam than past models.

But for the balloons that do make their way home, the instruments can usually be refurbished and reused. Each balloon has an attached prepackaged enveloped with instructions on how to return the instrument to the weather service, Wolf said.

“The envelope says, ‘If you find this, open here,’” she added.

Contact Rio Lacanlale at rlacanlale@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0381. Follow @riolacanlale on Twitter.