Okay, so I got this idea the other day: how big are those weather balloons? I mean, we see them all the time in movies or whatever, but I had no actual idea. So, I decided to figure it out for myself.
First, I did a bit of digging around. Turns out, there are a bunch of different sizes for these balloons. Some folks online were saying that the payload is really small, about the size of a credit card. That seemed crazy to me, but I guess it makes sense if you think about it.
I saw some numbers about the weight of these balloons, like 150g, 500g, and even 2000g. I’m assuming that’s the weight of the balloon itself, not including the payload. It seems like the weight just represents the size of the balloon. I still am not quite sure.
My Little Experiment
After gathering some data, I decided I’d try to get a feel for how big these balloons are by doing a little experiment. I went to the store and bought a regular party balloon, one of those big ones, you know? I blew it up to different sizes and tried to imagine it getting bigger and bigger. Sounds silly, I know, but it helped.
I started with a small size, like, maybe a foot across. That didn’t seem very big at all. Then I blew it up more, to like, three feet across. Getting there, but still not quite as big as I was thinking.
- Small size: Around 1 foot across – felt tiny.
- Medium size: Around 3 feet across – getting closer.
- Big size: Tried to get it to 6 feet across, but it popped!
Finally, I tried to get it to around six feet across, but it popped! I guess I got a bit too ambitious. That was the end of that experiment. I don’t think my experiment was very effective.
Conclusion
From what I gathered, these weather balloons go up super high, like over 50,000 feet, and I even read about some going over 90,000 feet! That’s crazy high! I think the height depends on the location they’re launched from and how much the balloon can expand.
So, yeah, weather balloons are way bigger than I initially thought. They start off relatively small but expand a ton as they go up. My little balloon experiment was a bit of a bust, but hey, at least I learned something!