Experiment idea

[Andrew Lockley]

If you put a smoke grenade on a stratosphere balloon, can you learn anything useful by tracking the plume using a ground based telescope? If it's coloured smoke, it should be pretty easy to see. If you have a searchlight or lidar, you could track it at night, too - or just use the moon on a clear night. Would that work? 

[Adrian Tuck]

As requested by Andrew.

Begin forwarded message:

From: Andrew Lockley <andrew....@gmail.com>

Subject: Re: [geo] Experiment idea

Date: 2 November 2020 at 16:59:57 GMT-7

To: Adrian Tuck <dr.adri...@sciencespectrum.co.uk>

Thanks. Can you repost to the list?

Andrew 

On Mon, 2 Nov 2020, 23:58 Adrian Tuck, <dr.adri...@sciencespectrum.co.uk> wrote:

Let me relate a little history. My old boss at the Met Office in the 1970s was Bob Murgatroyd, discoverer of the fact that the winds in the stratosphere were easterly in summer and westerly in winter - that was in the first half of WW2. He had been posted from the Met Office to RAE Farnborough, ranked as a Captain in the Anti-Aircraft Artillery. The RAF Mosquitoes were having a puzzling time, with the winds in the lower stratosphere not being consistent. Bob rigged up a heavy AA gun to fire vertically, using smoke shells and made his discovery, westerlies in winter, easterlies in summer. He was just getting his first results when he was visited by an Air Ministry scientist, a small man in a shiny old blue suit with a battered brief case. After asking some questions, he remarked that Bob’s work was very interesting. A short while later, Bob was posted from the Army and made a Flight Lieutenant in the RAF.The AM boffin was Sidney Chapman, discoverer of the Chapman reactions that produce ozone in the stratosphere. Bob wound up as chief forecaster for all the Allied air forces in Europe after the Normandy invasion, and became head of the `Meteorological Research Flight at Farnborough after the war. He did pioneering work on the circulation of radioactive isotopes there, and when he moved to Met Office HQ at Bracknell. Using tracers in the stratosphere is a difficult exercise. The heavier radioactive isotopes from the weapon testing of the 1950s and 1960s attached themselves to aerosols. Both they and the lighter gaseous ones have to be treated statistically; attempts to use specific releases and track them individually have not met with much success.

On 2 Nov 2020, at 13:47, Andrew Lockley <andrew....@gmail.com> wrote:

If you put a smoke grenade on a stratosphere balloon, can you learn anything useful by tracking the plume using a ground based telescope? If it's coloured smoke, it should be pretty easy to see. If you have a searchlight or lidar, you could track it at night, too - or just use the moon on a clear night. Would that work? 

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