Enhancing USAF Weather Forecasting with a Novel, Long-Reach Weather Balloon System that Generates Twice the Data as the Current Standard

Urban Sky is an aerospace startup that develops innovative stratospheric flight and remote sensing systems. For this Phase I SBIR, Urban Sky is proposing the development of a novel weather balloon system that would double the data a current weather balloon can collect, while also reaching new parts of the sky previously inaccessible to weather balloons. Today, critical weather data like wind speed, direction, pressure, etc. is collected via stratospheric weather balloons carrying radiosonde instruments. These balloons pop at the top of their flight profiles. After popping, the radiosonde instruments they carry fall to Earth. Those radiosondes do not collect weather data on descent, a massive lost opportunity for improving global and targeted forecast models. Urban Sky has conceptually designed a new weather balloon with a low-cost, software-controlled valving system that can actively arrest a balloon’s ascent at target altitudes and initiate a slow and controlled descent to continue collecting data all the way back down to Earth. Future revisions of these systems could be launched hundreds of miles away from specific areas of interest and be placed into desired descent trajectories to capture detailed and fresh weather measurements needed for USAF and DoD operations.