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My Discovery
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In August, Bering will travel to Ottumwa, Iowa ("home of Radar O'Reilly," he notes), and set up shop at an airfield just outside of town. There he and his crew will wait for large storms to start brewing over the Plains. And when they do, they'll send large balloons loaded with instruments up into the clouds. Bering hopes to launch five such balloons during the first three weeks of August. "These are the giant gasbags that produce UFO reports," Bering says of the balloons, which are 100 feet in diameter. Suspended 600 feet beneath the balloon will be the payload -- a box filled with electronic equipment and bristling with 8-foot-long antennae. Launches will take place shortly before sundown, allowing enough time for the balloons to get aloft and in position by dark, when sprite activity can be confirmed from the ground. Up for a closer look The balloons will float to just over 100,000 feet, then drift west on air currents. The instruments on board will measure changes in upper level electric and magnetic fields during the storm. With the data captured, the payloads will be released via parachute near sunrise and recovered by teams on the ground. Back at the university, readings will be correlated with ground observations from a weather observatory in Colorado. Floating a balloon directly over a sprite-producing storm, and potentially through the sprites themselves, would be exciting -- probably a little too exciting. There have been cases in which balloons have lost their payloads prematurely, perhaps due to errant electrical discharges. Bering isn't about to have that happen this summer. "The possibility of having 200 pounds of instruments crashing into Cheyenne, Wyoming, doesn't sit well with planners," Bering says. So he'll aim to float the balloons about 40 miles from sprite-producing storms. Why all the interest in sprites? "It's not necessarily clear that there's any practical application, other than better understanding significant activities like thunderstorms," says Bering. "But that's a pretty big 'other than.'" The research by Bering and others may also lead to safer skies for the space shuttle and civilian aircraft. "We know it can knock a balloon out," Bering says. "Can it have an effect on aircraft? That we don't know." ----------------------------------------------------
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