On July 14, 2017 the Perlan Weather Balloon crew got up very early. They took breakfast with them to the hangar. Sandra, Elizabeth, Loris, Stewart and Martin got the helium into balloon and were ready to launch.
Unfortunately a plane landing almost 300 kilometers away caused a clearance hold from Comordoro at the last minute. After waiting 90 minutes and singing with Loris to celebrate Bastile Day, they received permission to launch.
It was a great success. Loris had bulit a Virtual Balloon Cockpit tracking website in amazingly short time. From the cabins we cheered when we saw the launch around 9 am. It was 10,000 feet by the time it was East of our Lake. It was 60,000 feet in an hour. We had a betting pool for altitude attained, which Stewart won. It cleared 105,000 before coming down over the Atlantic Ocean.
The software gave us a skew-T plot of winds and altitudes. It also let us know where the tropopause was for the day at only 22,000 feet. Above this altitude (which varies) the temparature stabilizeded at -57 C and did not get colder as the balloon climbed higher. Tomorrow I will blog about the Perlan 2 dress rehersal.
Perlan2 Ready to Soar, Jackie
