Balloons, Buoys, Probes: just some of the Global Menagerie of Data Senders and Receivers
If you are just returning from a place with total media blackout you would be wondering if Earth is under attack. With one huge propeller driven balloon shot down by a US fighter jet (February 4, shown above) sporting a height of approximately 60m (200ft) off the coast of South Carolina (US) and subsequently three others not well described also brought down by missiles over US and Canada, the past several days have been uniquely bizarre. By the way, the last three have been declared frivolous hobby balloons or wayward weather balloons. Regardless, airline pilots and passengers would not be amused considering the altitudes at which the “unidentified objects” were brought down.
Granted, we’ve enjoyed some exotic theories via media about “what, where and from whom” and no lack stories claiming aliens were doing recon missions. All this intrigue raises an interesting question: what are some of the monitoring and surveillance that occur daily in our global community, and lest we forget, within and outside our solar system?
Solar System Probes
Voyager 1 and 2 are still sending information back to Earth after nearly 45 years since their launch . The image above makes it obvious that humans are curious and spending billions of dollars to find out what is in our solar system, and beyond.
Global Greenhouse Gas Monitors
The map above includes the longest active CO2 monitoring station in the world atop Mauna Loa in Hawaii: https://gml.noaa.gov/obop/mlo/ . The Global Monitoring Laboratory is crucial to the work of climatologists, atmospheric scientist, also marine and terrestrial research:
“Weekly data are used from the most remote sites appearing in Figure 1 to create smoothed north-south latitude profiles from which global averages and trends are calculated (Figure 2, not shown here). For example, the atmospheric abundance of CO2 has increased by an average of 1.88 ppm per year over the past 42 years (1979–2021). This increase in CO2 is accelerating — while it averaged about 1.6 ppm per year in the 1980s and 1.5 ppm per year in the 1990s, the growth rate increased to 2.4 ppm per year during the last decade (2011–2021). The annual CO2 increase from 1 Jan 2021 to 1 Jan 2022 was 2.60 ± 0.08 ppm (see https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/global.html)”
Satellites and lots of “Junk”
“By the end of January 2022, there were 12,293 objects launched into the space. Moreover, there are 31 different launch facilities listed by UNOOSA, including air-based, sea-based and even submarine-based launches. ; there are 8,261 satellites orbiting the Earth as on January 2022, out of which only 4,852 satellites are active (as at the end of December 2021)”
Piled onto that number is > 27,000 pieces of space “debris” aka junk: see the photo above. Monitoring is done by several agencies world wide, e.g. UNOSA, NASA and the US Department of Defense.
Ocean Buoys
There are at lease 1300 ocean buoys (above) gathering data used by ocean vessels, climate scientists and weather networks.
Space Telescopes
The James Webb space telescope (JWST, seen above) was launched in December 2021 and is often compared to the older, but still functioning, Hubble space telescope. They are managed by the Space Telescope Science Institute at Johns Hopkins University (US): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Stsci_logo.png
The JWST early on has increased our knowledge beyond expectations about this Universe where we find ourselves after 13.8 billion years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_the_universe
Global Meteorology
Meteorology is a much more complex science than reporting our daily weather, which is very important, but only a small fraction of the data gathered. Go here for more information about the programmes managed by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO): https://public.wmo.int/en/programmes .
Radiosondes: “weather balloons”
Here’s a global map of radiosonde launches.
“Worldwide, there are about 1,300 upper-air stations. Observations are made by the NWS at 92 stations: 69 in the conterminous United States, 13 in Alaska, nine in the Pacific, and one in Puerto Rico.” They are mainly designed to collect temperature, relative humidity and atmospheric pressure.
