[ramonyc]

Neat :) I'm involved in a few projects focused on vertical profiling in the coastal urban boundary layer.

I saw in a response you said the balloons will periodically return to sea level and ascend (which sounds like a fun design challenge by itself.) Will you be doing so near populated areas as well?

Good luck!

[tndl]

Very interesting, I'd love to hear more about it! In short, yes, we plan to do descents near urban areas if there's a route where we can go down to a safe height and stay away from any airspace. What cities are you looking at right now?

[ramonyc]

Most recently Houston had a large ARM field campaign which brought together a lot of atmospheric scientists from around the country. (https://www.arm.gov/research/campaigns/amf2021tracer)

ARM is a DOE program that ships top-tier instrumentation to various sites around the world. Loads of university researchers will follow, and you end up with a massive open source data pool. Houston in particular was focused on Aerosol effects on precipitation in the Coastal-Urban environment. There were loads of balloon launches from sites all over the city during the campaign, from large ozonesondes to the tiny sparv embedded foam cup ones (https://sparvembedded.com/products/windsond)

I'm in NY, and my university NOAA department has a focus on PBL Ozone measurements lately. My work in particular is focused on low cost UAV profiling up to about 150m, with a pipe dream of doing 0-3km.

I'm just a grad student, but if anything there sounds interesting feel free to email and I can try and get you in touch with more knowledgeable people.