Weather balloon lands on power lines in South Whitehall

What goes up must come down, and that was on full display Friday night near the intersection of 19th Street and Walbert Avenue in South Whitehall Township.

That’s where a weather balloon made its final descent, getting tangled around some power lines just before 9 p.m. Township police said they shut down the road until 11:20 p.m., so PPL crews could remove the balloon from the lines.

Police said the balloon’s label noted it belonged to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and that it should be disposed of. So that’s what was done, police said.

But what the heck is a weather balloon anyway?

Twice a day — every day of the year — weather balloons are simultaneously launched from about 900 locations worldwide to help provide a snapshot of key weather parameters, according to the website of the National

Weather Service, a NOAA subagency. That includes about 92 released by the weather service in the United States and its territories.

“All over the world, everybody releases it at the same time, so we have that snapshot,” said Michael Silva, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Mount Holly, New Jersey.

The balloons themselves are made of latex or synthetic rubber and are filled with either hydrogen or helium. It measures about 6 feet wide when launched, expanding to about 20 feet in diameter as it rises.

A battery-powered radiosonde is attached to the balloon, measuring pressure, temperature and relative humidity as the balloon rises as high as 100,000 feet, or about 20 miles, in the atmosphere. The transmitter on the radiosonde transmits data back to ground-based tracking equipment every few seconds, the website states.

The balloon can drift up to 125 miles away during its roughly two-hour flight.

Eventually, however, the balloon must burst, which is where the orange parachute attached to the end of the balloon comes in. The parachute allows the radiosonde to fall to the ground at less than 22 miles per hour. While South Whitehall police said the label they found said to dispose of the device, some radiosondes come with a postage paid mailbag so they can be sent back to the weather service and refurbished.

As for where the weather balloon that landed in South Whitehall came from, that’s hard to know.

If it came from the east, Silva believes it could have come from the Long Island area. If from the west, Silva thinks it was launched from Pittsburgh, Buffalo or possibly Sterling, Virginia.

It’s really anyone’s gas.