page_title: Radiosonde
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Radiosonde / History
caption_attribution_description: English: US sailors launching a radiosonde at a military airport in 1943 during World War 2. The radiosonde consists of a battery-powered instrument package (white box) carried aloft with a helium-filled weather balloon. As it ascends it measures temperature, humidity, and air pressure and radios the information to a ground receiver. At an altitude of around 70,000 ft (23 km) the balloon pops, and the radiosonde floats back to earth suspended by the the red parachute visible on the support line. By WW2 the US Weather Bureau launched weather balloons daily from 80 sites around the US
context_page_description: A radiosonde is a battery-powered telemetry instrument carried into the atmosphere usually by a weather balloon that measures various atmospheric parameters and transmits them by radio to a ground receiver. Modern radiosondes measure or calculate the following variables: altitude, pressure, temperature, relative humidity, wind, cosmic ray readings at high altitude and geographical position. Radiosondes measuring ozone concentration are known as ozonesondes.
  Radiosondes may operate at a radio frequency of 403 MHz or 1680 MHz. A radiosonde whose position is tracked as it ascends to give wind speed and direction information is called a rawinsonde. Most radiosondes have radar reflectors and are technically rawinsondes. A radiosonde that is dropped from an airplane and falls, rather than being carried by a balloon is called a dropsonde. Radiosondes are an essential source of meteorological data, and hundreds are launched all over the world daily.
context_section_description: The first flights of aerological instruments were done in the second half of the 19th century with kites and meteographs, a recording device measuring pressure and temperature that was recuperated after the experiment. This proved to be difficult because the kites were linked to the ground and were very difficult to manoeuvre in gusty conditions. Furthermore, the sounding was limited to low altitudes because of the link to the ground.
  Gustave Hermite and Georges Besançon, from France, were the first in 1892 to use a balloon to fly the meteograph. In 1898, Léon Teisserenc de Bort organized at the Observatoire de Météorologie Dynamique de Trappes the first regular daily use of these balloons. Data from these launches showed that the temperature lowered with height up to a certain altitude, which varied with the season, and then stabilized above this altitude. De Bort's discovery of the tropopause and stratosphere was announced in 1902 at the French Academy of Sciences. Other researchers, like Richard Aßmann and William Henry Dines, were working at the same times with similar instruments.
  In 1924, Colonel William Blaire in the U.S. Signal Corps did the first primitive experiments with weather measurements from balloon, making use of the temperature dependence of radio circuits. The first true radiosonde that sent precise encoded telemetry from weather sensors was invented in France by Robert Bureau. Bureau coined the name "radiosonde" and flew the first instrument on January 7, 1929. Developed independently a year later, Pavel Molchanov flew a radiosonde on January 30, 1930. Molchanov's design became a popular standard because of its simplicity and because it converted sensor readings to Morse code, making it easy to use without special equipment or training.
  Working with a modified Molchanov sonde, Sergey Vernov was the first to use radiosondes to perform cosmic ray readings at high altitude. On April 1, 1935, he took measurements up to 13.6 km (8.5 mi) using a pair of Geiger counters in an anti-coincidence circuit to avoid counting secondary ray showers. This became an important technique in the field, and Vernov flew his radiosondes on land and sea over the next few years, measuring the radiation's latitude dependence caused by the Earth's magnetic field.
  In 1936, the U.S. Navy assigned the U.S. Bureau of Standards (NBS) to develop an official radiosonde for the Navy to use. The NBS gave the project to Harry Diamond, who had previously worked on radio navigation and invented a blind landing system for airplanes. The organization led by Diamond eventually (in 1992) became a part of the U.S. Army Research Laboratory. In 1937, Diamond, along with his associates Francis Dunmore and Wilbur Hinmann, Jr., created a radiosonde that employed audio-frequency subcarrier modulation with the help of a resistance-capacity relaxation oscillator. In addition, this NBS radiosonde was capable of measuring temperature and humidity at higher altitudes than conventional radiosondes at the time due to the use of electric sensors.
  In 1938, Diamond developed the first ground receiver for the radiosonde, which prompted the first service use of the NBS radiosondes in the Navy. Then in 1939, Diamond and his colleagues developed a ground-based radiosonde called the “remote weather station,” which allowed them to automatically collect weather data in remote and inhospitable locations. By 1940, the NBS radiosonde system included a pressure drive, which measured temperature and humidity as functions of pressure. It also gathered data on cloud thickness and light intensity in the atmosphere. Due to this and other improvements in cost (about $25), weight (> 1 kilogram), and accuracy, hundreds of thousands of NBS-style radiosondes were produced nationwide for research purposes, and the apparatus was officially adopted by the U.S. Weather Bureau.
  Diamond was given the Washington Academy of Sciences Engineering Award in 1940 and the IRE Fellow Award (which was later renamed the Harry Diamond Memorial Award) in 1943 for his contributions to radio-meteorolog
caption: US sailors launching a radiosonde during World War 2
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