10/18/2026
Take a glimpse at a part of our Atmospheric Research Mission going into 2027
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.
