Learning To Be Launch Weather Officers

This morning, 395 6th Grade Students at Pizitz Middle School in Vestavia will be learning a little meteorology for a big project. They will become Launch Weather Officers for their PiBaL project. The Pizitz Balloon Launch will be the school’s second annual highball flight. Last year, they successfully flew a weather balloon to an altitude of 106,693 feet and recovered the payload near Woodland in Randolph County. Read stories from last year’s successful launch here and here.

Bella Gentry, a sixth grader at Pizitz contributed this report:

Pizitz students are learning about weather in an innovative way. They are launching a weather balloon with the help of meteorologist Bill Murray.

Bill Murray will help the students pick a suitable day to launch the balloon, help them learn about the balloon, and teach them how to read weather charts.

The students are helping to build the balloon and are using two GoPros to film everything. They are also using a device called Spot Tracker to track the balloon.

They used last year’s model as a reference to build this year’s model.

The balloon is expected to reach heights of the upper troposphere or above (about 10 km/6.214 mi or above).

If you didn’t know, a weather balloon uses devices to track and record temperature, air pressure, climate change, humidity, and wind speed.

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