First published in The Record, July 20, 2015

The Weather Channel. Weather on the 1’s. Balloons power it all.

Weather balloons lead short, exciting lives. Few other things start out resembling a large Ikea lamp, grow to the size of a two-car garage, kiss the soft lower lip of space, and then pop. Few are watched so closely as they ascend, nor so completely ignored as they crash.

"I don't really think much about the balloons after we're done with them," said Joe Pollina, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service station in Upton, Long Island, which forecasts weather for New Jersey and the New York region.

The technology of weather balloons might be charitably described as mature. The balloons themselves have not changed since the 1930s. They carry aloft instruments that measure humidity, temperature, air pressure and wind. Over time the instrument clusters have resembled V8 engines, movie projectors and wine boxes; until recently they looked like containers of takeout Chinese food.

Yet for all their apparent antiquity, weather balloons remain the primary tool of global weather prediction, gathering the massive streams of data that power smartphone weather apps and 24-hour weather channels and instant digital alerts about thunderstorms, tornadoes and floods.

"People seem to think it all comes from satellites. And the pretty pictures do come from satellites," said John Powell, owner of JP Aerospace, a California company that builds airships for commercial and scientific missions that operate in the same near-space altitudes as weather balloons. "But the backbone of all the data comes from the weather balloons."

Standing inside the National Weather Service's office in Upton, meteorology student Kevin Kacan sliced open a rectangular package wrapped in shiny silver plastic. He extracted a device called a radiosonde that is the shape and size of a cellular phone charger. Kacan calibrated the device to a weather service computer, then drove it down a bumpy road to the Upper Air Inflation Building, a fancy name for a concrete shed on the edge of a shaggy field.

Preparing a weather balloon for flight is loud, low-tech work. Kacan laid a fresh balloon on a table, stretched its open end around a metal nozzle, secured it with a metal clamp, and turned on the gas. Helium sprayed into the balloon with a noise as high and piercing as jet exhaust. As it expanded, the balloon took different shapes -- now a cucumber, now a human brain. Toward the end it was round and squishy, and it bounced in the air like egg drop soup.

Using twine, Kacan tied the radiosonde to the balloon, and then an orange parachute. The balloon will rise to about 100,000 feet, three times the altitude of most jetliners. Air pressure at that altitude is so low that the balloon will keep expanding until it bursts. The parachute will slow the radiosonde's fall back to Earth.

"In all the years we've been doing this, I've never heard of anyone getting hit by one of these," Pollina said.

At two minutes past 7 p.m., Kacan stood outside, holding the strung-together contraption in his left hand. A rain squall blew overhead while Kacan was inside the inflation shed, and when he came outside its trailing winds pulled the balloon sideways, toward a line of trees at the field's northern edge.

"All eyes are on you now. Don't hit the trees!" Pollina said, joking. To a visitor he said, "We don't want to hit the building, either. That's happened a number of times. And we've had our fair share of hitting the trees."

This weather station wasn't always rural. Until 1993 it was located at Rockefeller Center, where balloons were launched from the observation deck, Pollina said. Besides such rare moves, the weather balloon program hasn't changed much since it started in 1937. That consistency is key to its success, Powell said. More than radar and satellites, information from the balloons is the largest single data pile used by different weather-modeling algorithms around the world to predict weather, Powell said.

It's also the only monitoring system capable of taking measurements through the entire air column, from the surface of the Earth to the top of the atmosphere. And since that data stretches back 78 years, it's useful to scientists studying the long-term mechanisms of climate change, according to the Weather Service.

"You can see how the wind was blowing at any altitude in any place all over the world," Powell said. "It's all there. For us it's invaluable."

Ups and Downs

Standing on the edge of the grass, Kacan let go of the balloon. It jumped into the air, zigged west, zagged east, lifted the radiosonde into the air and accelerated into the clouds. Kacan, Pollina and meteorologist Carlie Buccola climbed back into a blue government SUV, drove back to their office and turned on a computer screen to monitor the flight.

The balloon flew north, climbing 1,000 feet every minute. Its radio antenna beamed down data, causing a chart on Kacan's computer to refresh twice a second with new data.

Sometimes, when the wind is still, a balloon flies straight up, pops and falls straight down. Pollina has worked at Upton since 2004, and in that time "about half a dozen" radiosondes crashed so close that neighbors drove them back to the weather station, he said.

Others fly to Massachusetts. Crashed radiosondes can be mailed to a Weather Service facility in Kansas City for reconditioning, Pollina said.

But most balloons launched from Upton are never seen again. Some fall into Long Island Sound; others blow hundreds of miles into the Atlantic. Winds over Long Island last Tuesday blew weakly north, so the balloon was unlikely to reach the beach in Connecticut.

"It probably will land today in the sound," Pollina said. "This one is probably not going to be found."

The weather balloon was at 15,000 feet and climbing. It had no camera, but the view must have been wonderful, with the sun framed between two layers of clouds and the towers of Manhattan in the distance. Inside the low brick weather station the view was of radar screens, CNN on televisions and stacks of file folders. As the GPS receiver in the office tracked the balloon's position and the computer recorded its weather readings, the meteorologists stepped away and looked around their office bathed in fluorescent light.

"So now we watch it for an hour and a half or two hours as we do other things," Pollina said. "We'll probably go and update Facebook."