Australia Weather News

Pete Furphy never expected to be collecting high-tech scientific equipment when he took his kids to clean a remote beach on Victoria's south-west coast.

The Furphys were scouring a 3.5-kilometre stretch of Warrnambool beach, three hours' drive west of Melbourne, when his 12-year-old daughter spotted a piece of plastic foam with an antenna and a deflated piece of latex attached.

A bit of research revealed it was not ordinary marine debris — they had found the remains of a weather balloon that had floated across Bass Strait from Tasmania.

It was launched as part of a US-led project studying climate and atmospheric conditions.

About 1,300 weather balloons are launched globally every day, according to the World Meteorological Organisation.

How many of those, like the Furphy's find, end up on a beach far from home is not clear.

"It's like state-sanctioned littering," Mr Furphy said.

"To be on that beach when we're so far away from other urban centres, it's a shock to see the plastic."

Keeping the coast clear

Colleen Hughson leads the team of environmental warriors cleaning beaches across the south-west.

She was not as surprised by the find.

"She said we've been getting heaps of them this summer, they're putting up two of them every day," Mr Furphy said.

"But that day we went out we found two of these meteorological measuring devices, which is quite extraordinary."

The balloons are launched from the Kennaook/Cape Grim Baseline Air Pollution Station on Tasmania's north-west tip — one of just three sites globally selected for their pristine air quality.

Each package carries a radiosonde — a styrofoam box with sensors, GPS, and batteries — to measure temperatures, relative humidity, pressure, wind speed, wind direction.

Warrnambool's Beach Patrol crew have found five other similar balloons washed up on south-west Victorian shores this summer.

The CAPE-k project

The weather balloons found in Warrnambool were from the CAPE-k research project hosted by the CSIRO, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, and the US Department of Energy.

The project's operations manager, Heath Powers, said taking samples in such a pristine environment allowed researchers to gather data about how clouds formed without influence from emissions.

Every day, up to four weather balloons are launched from the station and rise 25 kilometres into the atmosphere.

"They start off as pretty decent-sized party balloons … and as they go up the atmospheric pressure drops and they get bigger and bigger and bigger until at the top of their flight they're about the size of a school bus," Mr Powers said.

"That's when they finally burst and fall back to Earth."

Eco-friendly options

Mr Powers said the balloons, which were made out of a natural latex rubber, and the attached packages were ultimately incorporated into the environment because there was no practical way to retrieve them.

He said testing of more eco-friendly packages was underway.

The new radiosonde packages are made out of a wax-covered cardboard wrapping.

Mr Powers said the research was important enough to justify the environmental impact.

"Clouds have a huge impact on warming and cooling of the Earth's surface, which impacts everything from long-term climate to short-term weather," Mr Powers said.

He said launching weather balloons was "absolutely vital" to scientific research and operational science, such as forecasting and understanding how weather impacted people.

"I want to acknowledge that these certainly have an environmental impact and we're working to try and improve and minimise the impact," he said.

"The trade-off is that the measurements and the impact on people's quality of life and people's safety by knowing what the weather is, are absolutely important and that's part of the trade-off equation."