In 1981, weather disasters caused $3.5 billion in damages in the United States. In 2023, that number was $94.9 billion (https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/billions/time-series). The National Weather Service spends billions annually on its network of weather balloons, satellites, and aircraft sensors – generating hundreds of terabytes of data every day. This data, called observation data, is fed into massive supercomputers running advanced physics to produce global weather forecasts. Despite this cost, there are still places in the US where we don't know what the temperature will be two days from now: https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/interacti.... And for the rest of the world that lacks weather infrastructure? There’s always the Weather Rock: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_rock.
The most important data for these forecasts come from vertical data ‘slices’ of the atmosphere, called soundings. Every day 2,500 single-use latex radiosondes are launched across the globe to collect these soundings. They stay aloft for about two hours before popping and falling back to Earth. Launch sites for these systems are sparse in Latin America and Africa, and they’re completely non-existent over oceans. This leaves about 80% of the globe with inadequate weather data for accurate predictions.
The coverage gap became painfully evident to Max and Alex during their time at Urban Sky. While building balloons for high-altitude aerial imaging, they kept running into a problem: no matter what weather forecast they used, they couldn’t get accurate wind predictions for the upper atmosphere. They tried all of the free and commercial forecast products, but none of them were accurate enough. Digging into it more, we learned that a big part of the problem was the lack of high-quality in-situ data at those altitudes.
To solve this problem, our systems ascend and descend between sea level and 65,000ft several times a day to collect vertical data soundings. Each vehicle (balloon + payload) weighs less than a pound and can be launched from anywhere in the world, per the FAA and ICAO reg. Here’s one we launched from Potrero Hill in SF, https://youtu.be/75fN5WpRWH0 and here’s another near the Golden Gate Bridge, https://youtu.be/7yLmzLPUFVQ. Although we can’t “drive” these balloons laterally, we can use opposing wind layers to target or avoid specific regions. Here’s what a few simulated flight paths look like, to give you an idea: https://youtu.be/F_Di8cjaEUY
Our payload uses a satellite transceiver for communications and a small, thin film solar panel array to generate power. In addition to the weather data, we also get real-time telemetry from the vehicles, which we use to optimize their flight paths. This includes maintaining the optimal spacing between balloons and steering them to a recovery zone at the end of their lifespan so we can recycle them.
These systems spend most of their time in the stratosphere which is an extremely unforgiving environment. We’ll often see temperatures as low as -80°C while flying near the equator. Throughout the day, we experience extreme temperature cycling as they ascend and descend through the atmosphere. We’ll often encounter 100mph+ wind shears near the boundary with the troposphere (the tropopause) that can rip apart the balloon envelope. These conditions make the stratosphere a very difficult place to deploy to prod.
The real magic of what we’re building will come into play when we have hundreds of these systems in the air over data-sparse regions. But even now, we can do useful and interesting things with them. Some of our early customers are companies who fly very big, very expensive things into the stratosphere. They use our balloons to give them a clear idea of what conditions are ahead of their operations, and we’re working on a forecast product specifically designed for the stratosphere.
The combination of long duration and low cost is novel. We can theoretically maintain thousands of balloons in the atmosphere at any given time for a tenth of the cost of one useful weather satellite. We’re also using the data we collect to train AI models that produce forecasts with better accuracy than existing numerical (supercomputer) forecasts. Because we’re collecting totally unique data over areas that lack observation, our models will maintain a consistent edge versus models that are only trained on open data.
We’re really excited to be launching Sorcerer here with you! We’d love to hear what you think. And if you find one of our balloons in the Bay Area: Sorry! It’s still a work in progress (and please get it back to us).
I’ll leave you all with a bonus video of Paul Buchheit launching one of our balloons, which we thought was pretty cool: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sngF9VvDzg
by Andrey
Azimov