The challenges of shipborne weather balloon launches

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Description

The second ARM Mobile Facility (AMF2) Marine ARM GPCI Investigation of Clouds (MAGIC) field campaign presented an abundance of new hurdles for collecting scientific data. This was the first ARM campaign to be aboard a ship. The Horizon Spirit container ship travels between Los Angeles and Honolulu each week. Managing data collection from the balloon-borne sounding system (BBSS) on a moving ship was a challenging task for the meteorological technicians, not only in maneuvering a large balloon in high winds, but logistically getting the radiosonde to clear the cargo within a large turbulent environment caused by the containers themselves. Due to the nature of the BBSS system, surface latitude and longitude needed post-flight corrections.