"SMART" BALLOONS CARRYING UNH-BUILT OZONE INSTRUMENT PROBE GULF OF MEXICO AIR

Sept. 26, 2006 — Six "smart" balloons carrying a state-of-the-art, miniature sensor for measuring ozone designed and built by scientists at the University of New Hampshire, recently completed a series of flights measuring levels of the pollutant in the Houston area and over the Gulf of Mexico as part of 2006 Texas Air Quality Study II. (Click NOAA image for larger view of NOAA Smart Balloon before being launched on Aug. 30, 2006, by (left to right) John Porter and Jonathan Tytell of the University of Hawaii, and Randy Johnson of the NOAA Air Resources Laboratory Field Research Division. Click here for high resolution version. Please credit “NOAA.”)

The balloons—termed "smart" because they are designed to allow operators to remotely control their vertical height to sample different layers of the atmosphere—measured the ozone concentration and a number of other meteorological variables while immersed in plumes of urban of air.

Houston has one of the highest levels of ozone in the U.S., and scientists are trying to better understand how the pollutant is exported from "mega-polluted" areas such as Houston and Mexico City and what its impact is on the air quality of the Northern Hemisphere.

The first smart balloon, which stayed aloft for more than three days and traveled more than 2,500 kilometers before landing in Florida, encountered ozone levels in excess of 200 parts per billion in polluted air over the Gulf of Mexico. Such high levels of ozone are considered unhealthy under guidelines established by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

"The balloons provide a very unique platform," says Robert Talbot, director of the UNH Climate Change Research Center within the Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space where the miniature ozone sensor was developed.

"The real power of the balloons is the continuous observation on spatial scales that other platforms can't do," said Talbot. For example, a smart balloon, drifting at 10 meters per second in a polluted plume of air, can make much higher resolution measurements than an aircraft traveling ten times faster and flying in and out of the plume.

The balloons provided a new perspective on the flow and dispersion of pollution from the Houston area, and will help scientists learn how these plumes disperse over the Gulf of Mexico in particular so that computer models can be improved to better simulate and predict those processes.

Faculty and students from UNH and the University of Hawaii will work in collaboration with NOAA scientists in analyzing the data obtained during the smart balloon flights. The NOAA Air Resources Laboratory Field Research Division, in collaboration with the University of Hawaii, developed the smart balloon technology.

UNH led the overall balloon project for the summer Texas air quality campaign. Scientists and students from UNH also participated in the study by measuring levels of atmospheric nitric acid from the NOAA Research Vessel Ronald H. Brown and from an 18-story building on the University of Houston campus. UNH graduate students also measured the chemical composition and levels of aerosols in the Houston area.

The miniature ozone sensor was first deployed in the summer of 2004 during a massive air quality study called the International Consortium for Atmospheric Research on Transport and Transformation or ICARTT.

Talbot notes that continued work done by UNH engineers has upgraded the ozone sensor from a first-generation instrument to a "true research-grade precision instrument. The overall quality of the measurement is very high, accurate and reliable, and the sensor can respond to changes in ozone very quickly," Talbot said.

The UNH smart balloon work was funded under the Targeted Wind Sensing program while the other measurements made by UNH scientists were done under the university's AIRMAP program.

In 2007 NOAA, an agency of the U.S. Commerce Department, celebrates 200 years of science and service to the nation. Starting with the establishment of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey in 1807 by Thomas Jefferson much of America's scientific heritage is rooted in NOAA. The agency is dedicated to enhancing economic security and national safety through the prediction and research of weather and climate-related events and information service delivery for transportation, and by providing environmental stewardship of the nation's coastal and marine resources. Through the emerging Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS), NOAA is working with its federal partners, more than 60 countries and the European Commission to develop a global monitoring network that is as integrated as the planet it observes, predicts and protects.

Relevant Web Sites
NOAA Air Resources Laboratory Field Research Division

NOAA Smart Balloons

Texas Air Quality Study / Gulf of Mexico Atmospheric Composition and Climate Study

Media Contact:
Kent Laborde, NOAA, (202) 482-3091
(Photo courtesy of NOAA’s Shane Beard.)