How Giant Balloons Are Helping California Prepare for Intense Storms

Just before the rays of dawn on Jan. 12 paraded over the cliffs that separate Bodega Bay from the expanse of the Pacific Ocean, Adolfo Lopez Miranda and Jacob Morgan inflated a shapeless giant silicone balloon with helium.

The duo worked inside a wooden gray shed.

A few minutes before seven, the two men hiked to a nearby hilltop, carrying the now bulging balloon, around 3 feet long and wide.

They attached a tiny red parachute with a translucent cord, added an array of weather sensors, and released it like kids at a birthday party.

They watched it lift over the dark ocean toward an incoming rainstorm forced over the Bay Area by an extended, narrow region in the sky transporting moisture called an atmospheric river.

Lopez Miranda and Morgan, engineers with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, are attempting to better understand these rivers in the sky, which can dump an onslaught of precipitation — several inches of rain in less than an hour — and trigger catastrophic flooding.

The duo flew up from San Diego to the UC Davis Coastal and Marine Sciences Institute’s Bodega Marine Laboratory for this storm. The weather balloon they launched directly into the atmospheric river will send back data on the storm’s course as it approaches the coast of California.

In 2022, a family of atmospheric rivers dumped so much rain over California that multiple levees crumbled from the weight and intensity of the water, destroying hundreds of homes and disrupting life for thousands of people.

For each storm, the team launches a new balloon every few hours.

As the balloons float higher and higher into the atmosphere, they expand. Attached is a small white styrofoam radiosonde, which collects data — temperature, location, wind speed, wind direction, humidity and pressure — and transmits it to a computer in the wooden shack.

As the balloon ascends, the atmospheric pressure decreases, and the balloon eventually swells to the size of a school bus. “When it’s that big, the latex is stretched so thin that eventually it pops,” Morgan said.

According to Morgan, the balloon he released on the morning of Jan. 12 burst around 15 miles into the atmosphere and parachuted down.

“Unfortunately, they might land in a tree or mountain,” Lopez Miranda said. “We know where they are, but sometimes they’re miles away from here where we don’t have access to.”

All the information the device collects is vital to tell forecasters how fast the storm is approaching, where it’s headed, how warm it will be, and how much rain the storm will likely drop. Within a few hours, the data is uploaded to the university’s database and made available to the National Weather Service to incorporate into real-time forecasting models.

“It’s really helpful for getting a better understanding of water availability in California and how we can better manage the water that we have and when we should expect to receive a big load of precipitation,” Morgan said.

As the balloons float into the stratosphere, airplanes equipped with similar sensors fly over the storm and survey it from above to understand how the storm is progressing from that perspective above the cloudy mass. The information researchers collect from above and within the storm allows cities, counties and emergency officials to know how to prepare in real time. The information also helps reservoir operators make more informed decisions about how much water to keep in them.

“This gives us a better idea of the weather and our decision-making with water-related things,” Lopez Miranda said. “I feel like we’re making better decisions now with all the information we’re getting, so you don’t feel like you’re gambling anymore.”

The Scripps balloon project has helped close the gap in knowledge of how a storm will progress, said Lopez-Miranda, who started as an intern with the group.

These real-time weather observations provide insights into the potential behavior of future storms made more intense by human-caused climate change, said Chad Hecht, a meteorologist at the Centre for Western Weather and Water Extremes at the University of California, San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

“There’s a lot of research that still needs to be done using this data, but what we are seeing is an exacerbation of that feast or famine hydroclimate in California,” he said.

With the pace of human-caused climate change speeding up, the frequency of storms could increase. A study from June 2022 by Bay Area scientists found that these deluges from the sky could become up to 37% wetter by the end of the century.

“Our infrastructure is not designed for these big storms, and we’re never going to be able to design it to handle them,” said Kris May, founder of the Pathways Climate Institute, a San Francisco-based consulting firm behind the study. “We’re gonna see more areas that flood that have never flooded before.”

Hecht said data collected by these balloon launches and aircraft is only “scratching the surface” of the knowledge needed to understand future weather intensifying because of climate change. Still, in the immediate, the new precipitation information is helping forecasters better inform people and water managers how to prepare for storms.

“To optimize water operations, we need to have the best precipitation forecast as possible because we want to store as much water as possible, but we also don’t want to store too much that leads to flooding impacts,” he said. “We can better prepare, whether that’s going to be on the impactful or beneficial end.”