Every day, meteorological agencies around the world launch about 1,700 weather balloons into the sky, and mostly they’re never seen again.
The sensors they carry — called radiosondes — are essential to weather forecasts, storm warnings and climate models, but they’re also a weirdly old-fashioned, single-use technology. Now a 22-year-old, self-styled hacker from Grenoble, France, wants to fly those weather instruments home.
Yohan Hadji has invented a lightweight foam glider outfitted with the weather sensors and a guidance system that’s carried by a balloon 19 miles up into the stratosphere. After transmitting essential data on the key atmospheric layer crisscrossed by commercial aircraft, it detaches and glides back to the launch site for reuse.
Radiosondes are relatively cheap — about $175 each — but with roughly 600,000 launched every year, the potential savings from the so-called Meteoglider are attracting the interest of government forecasting offices from Denmark and France to Switzerland.
Hadji’s reinvention of a centuries-old meteorological tool comes as forecasting is being reshaped by private companies, artificial intelligence and rising demand for sharper predictions in the face of extreme weather threats. Modern AI models can project storms faster — and often more accurately — than supercomputers, but they are only as good as the live data feeding them.
Two years ago, the Swiss weather technology company Meteomatics AG bought Hadji’s R2Home, the firm he founded as a teenager, in a mid-six-figure deal. But Hadji is continuing his work at the St. Gallen-based company.
“It’s basically my whole life at this point,” said Hadji, affectionately known as “Gliderboy” by his colleagues.
Meteogliders, designed for about 30 flights and offered as a service to government forecasters, could trim costs by roughly 30%, according to Hadji. The gliders can carry any model of radiosonde and attach to any balloon used at weather agencies around the world.
“They don’t change anything about the data, but still they save some money,” Hadji said of the gliders, which can reach nearly 200 miles per hour in the stratosphere on the flight back to the launch site.
The Danish Meteorological Institute, which started testing Meteogliders in April at the Danmarkshavn weather station in northeastern Greenland, spends more than $630,000 a year on radiosondes that almost always vanish. So far, it’s enthusiastic about the results, said Jacob L. Hoyer, head of satellites and the Arctic unit at the institute’s National Center for Climate Research.
Part of the pilot program is evaluating whether an upgraded glider could be used to safely return a $1,700 sensor used for weekly high-altitude balloon launches to measure ozone above the Arctic, which are also lost after launch. In its latest tender for radiosondes, the weather agency required a glider-recovery system.
Another benefit of reusing radiosondes in Greenland is environmental, Hoyer said.
“It’s an environmentally fragile region,” he says. “We are losing equipment, just throwing out the trash in nature.”
Wertz writes for Bloomberg.
