FAIR-WEATHER FIND

BUTTE — An afternoon family hike at Hatcher Pass touched off an educational mystery for a young Valley girl.

Jennifer Klebesadel, 9, a straight-A student in Butte Elementary School’s gifted and talented program, has an insatiable curiosity, says her mom, Lucy Klebesadel.

“Our daughter is just curious as heck,” she said. “For her, it’s always ‘why’ or what.’ She wants to be a scientist.”

That’s what made the family’s June 20 discovery of a downed weather balloon high up the pass exciting for Jennifer. Lucy spotted an orange dot up on the hillside.

“Well, actually, mommy saw it first and she said to go get it,” Jennifer said. “I went up and up and up and I finally got to it.”

With the balloon’s cords tangled up in the bushes, Jennifer said it was at first difficult to extricate the device. That was also when she realized it had something to do with monitoring weather.

“Well, at first I thought it was a box of dynamite,” she said. Because there were wires and cords coming from the box, “it looked like you see in the movies. But then I thought, ‘Why would a box of dynamite have a parachute on it?’”

It wasn’t an explosive device. In fact, Jennifer had collected a Radiosonde device attached to a weather balloon launched by the National Weather Service from Anchorage on Jan. 20. A Radiosonde is a sophisticated information-gathering device used by the NWS every day, said Travis Wilson, a recent ULCA graduate working at the Anchorage NWS office.

“It takes temperature, other data, relative humidity and pressure, and it has a GPS inside that will calculate its speed and direction,” he said.

Part of Wilson’s job entails launching two of the devices each day. The balloons are designed to soar to about 30 kilometers high, which is about three times the average cruising altitude of a jetliner, he said. They travel for a short time before the balloon pops because of the lack of air pressure at extreme altitude.

“They just go very high and are only up there for about two hours,” Wilson said. “We are transmitting one right now as we speak.”

All the data collected by Radiosondes is vital to modern weather forecasting, he said. “What we do with that data is we put it in the weather model, and that’s basically what makes the weather models so good.”

Retrieving the device was a great educational opportunity for the family, Jennifer’s father, Bill Klebesadel, said in an e-mail. “I was aware of the NWS’s efforts through engineering classes at UAF, but this is our first brush with it close up,” he said.

When Jennifer came down with the balloon, that’s when the questions started, Lucy said. Instead of giving their daughter the answers, her parents challenged her to investigate for herself.

“We said, ‘OK, you’re not going to learn unless you look for the answers,’” Lucy said.

One of the first things Jennifer discovered was information on the device indicating it was harmless and that, if found, asking that it be sent to an address in Kansas City, Mo. Then her inquisitive nature took over.

“I asked my dad billions of questions,” she said. “It was in a box and had these wires, so I was confused.”

So far, Jennifer has learned that using balloons is one method scientists use to gather information.

“I don’t get how they get the information (into the balloon’s instruments),” Jennifer said about what she’s learned so far. “But they launch it up and it kind of floats around gathering weather information. When it lands, it has a mailing thing on it so when somebody finds it, they can mail it back.

“I had no idea they launched weather balloons. What I learned was that they launch them up for information. I wonder how long it was up there before coming down?”

Contact Greg Johnson at greg.johnson@frontiersman.com or 352-2269.