What kind of advantages would a kite or blimp have over a plane or tower?
Planes travel pretty fast and they can’t fly low. We can deploy anywhere, and at any height, and the instruments can remain at one spot for hours at a time. Towers can take continuous data, but they’re limited in height to a few hundred meters. They’re also expensive to set up and definitely not portable. What types of measurements help you study the atmosphere? We have two different kinds of instruments. The first kind tells us about turbulence by measuring fluctuations in temperature and horizontal windspeed 1000 times a second. The second kind is a basic meteorological payload equipped with instruments that measure wind speed and direction, temperature and altitude. Why is turbulence important to measure? Turbulence tells you about the mixing properties of the atmosphere, how gases, including human-made pollutants, will be transported and diffused. It’s also used to determine the structure of the atmosphere, which is between night and day. If your goal is to study nocturnal atmosphe
