Evan Fryberger ☁️

Really cool seeing the weather balloon's path (blue line) going way up, higher than the storms, back on May 16th. This is the big Kansas I-70 dust storm day. I'll have more visuals from this event out soon. *This is our Event Data Portal, which we'll be releasing soon! Want to make this data as open as possible for everyone to learn from. This is funded by donations and social media revenue form our audience. @reconwx

Our Isopod ground-based pressure probes now have a second job: listening to our weather balloons. For 2027, we’re building a network of small, lightweight, rechargeable probes that record pressure changes 20 times per second. They store the data and automatically upload it to our database when they're back in-range of a Wifi network (retrieval of the device.) They're deployed around storms, where they’ll help us examine how pressure changes across different locations as supercells move through. This data gets ingested into our overall mission, which also features grouped launches of multiple weather balloon instruments. For just $1.50 more per device, those same pods can also serve as secondary receivers for the dozens of radiosondes we plan to launch beneath weather balloons during an event. The pods already had most of the required components to do so. As those balloons rise, they carry one of our two sonde types. Our standard sondes measure temperature, moisture, pressure, and wind. Our GPS-only sondes track position and wind. They transmit that data back to a receiver on the ground via a radio link. The problem with this is that sometimes a sonde can get carried too far away from a ground station receiver. Chances are, it'll be in range of another vehicle or receiver, but adding in up to 32 more receivers on the ground (the Isopods), we really decrease the risk of losing some of the data that the sondes send back. That gives us more opportunities to capture its transmissions as they travel, rather than depending on a single receiver. This is especially beneficial when launching multiple instruments at once. Deployable Isopods store received sonde data alongside their pressure records and automatically upload over configured Wi-Fi after retrieval. Our vehicle-mounted Isopod Vehicle Data Units can upload received sonde data live over the vehicle's WiFi internet access. This is how you get to see the sondes move around live in the app. The result: extremely high resolution pressure observations at the ground, atmospheric profiles above, and more receivers working together to bring the data home. We've also got our usual visual observations on the ground via live stream. This illustration shows how it works. It is not an actual deployment that happened or predicted radio coverage. Equipment and distances aren’t to scale. The supercell in the photo is real, but the rendering is just a conceptual design. As you can imagine, we don't have many photos of this system being used in perfectly lit photography conditions taken by helicopter. We're using crowd-funding from our audience to fund this mission. The budget is on our website for examination, but really only covers the *new* equipment. It does not touch on personnel costs or anything outside the additional equipment. If you'd like to help out this research operation, you can support with GoFundMe. Link's on the website. You can also download our 100% free app. No ads, no data mining, no paywall. We give you everything for free as a way of saying 'thank you' for supporting this mission. Follow along as we build, test, and prepare the network for 2027. @reconwx

2 soundings deployed on the severe thunderstorm warning near Medicine Lodge Kansas

This is what's going out tomorrow. It’s one of our STING radiosondes. It goes up with a weather balloon so we can measure how wind speed and direction change with height. I'm bringing two. The goal is one good launch ahead of a supercell, with enough time to set up properly. If we get the opportunity, we’ll launch the second a few minutes later and compare the profiles. In 2027, spacial and temporal observations via large groups of these instruments will be the game plan, matched with our surface pressure network of Isopods. We’ve vetted the system, now I want to see how it performs on this deployment. Follow along with @reconwx , the crowd-funded mission.

Another view of our Hurricane Isaias data. This one is from my iPhone. This graph shows every recorded phone pressure reading during the 1 hour landfall window with no smoothing. My lowest reading was 986.192 mb at 8:19:24 PM CDT. We’re collecting iPhone barometer data alongside our calibrated Isopod and Isopod VDU instruments to evaluate whether phones can serve as useful supplementary pressure sensors. Early comparisons show encouraging agreement in pressure trends, with persistent offsets between the phones and their companion instruments. Further testing will help establish their accuracy and practical limits. @reconwx

Looking at our preliminary Isaias telemetry, it appears that our iPhone 17 Pro Max, iPhone 16 Pro, and iPhone 13 devices were within 0.5mb of our calibrated Isopods. The Isopods record and stream data at a frequency of 20hz, meaning there's a new data point 20 times per second and are calibrated, known-good instruments. We're currently putting together a paper outlining the design, validation and use-case information on Isopods and our in-situ sounding system. Look for that soon, or keep up with progress on our roadmap on the website. An Android test will need to be conducted, also. May have to settle for a NorEaster or blizzard for that one. @reconwx

Currently working to analyze @reconwx data from our weather instruments during Hurricane Isaias. Preliminaries by morning.