yea makes sense

sufficiently accurate as a for fun thing to tinker with

not on the level of credible military intel of course

100 hPa level! (around 18000~21000 m)

Bro I am happy if I can make a website with a button that counts up...

I mean I put it in Australia and it landed in the straight between Madagascar and Africa and then put it on Poland-Belarus border and it made it around the world so make of that what you will

So cool!! What altitude is it flying at?

Plot twist. I spawned it from UK. Still it went over US 😂.

What a time to be alive

The internet! good job

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So based on this simulation, how accurate is it and would it be reasonably possible for a weather balloon to have floated its way all over the world?

I very much dislike news sensationalism and political propaganda so this gives a bit more insight on claims.

Just sequence all your weather data in reverse, time will flow backward.

this is the FBI , don't fucking move

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think what you actually built was a “where will GeorgieWashington’s weather balloons -that they drunkenly purchased one time- end up now that they have a reason to launch it” simulator.

Did you know about https://habhub.org/ ? They have a predictor too for actual launches. I’ve used it to launch three balloons years ago.

https://predict.sondehub.org/

And the live tracker for actual balloons

https://tracker.sondehub.org/

It's brilliantly fun, educational, and quite surprising!

Military: "This is classified information, where did you get ahold of this??"

Me: "I believe his name was DeepFriedPancake"

Can it be used with Microsoft Flight Simulator to simulate an F-22 with a sidewinder missile?

Asking for a friend...

Thats a massive undertaking considering all the data.

It is worth noting that it is possible for stratospheric balloons to navigate with purpose within the chaos of different wind currents by controlling their altitude in order to choose which current to ride at a given moment. This is a thing that has been done. How difficult it is I leave to the nation states that might want to sense something they can’t detect from satellite altitudes (like magnetic fluctuations?) —or to the ham radio enthusiasts whose $100 Arduino balloons attract the ire of very expensive jet-fired munitions.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210222-how-googles-hot-air-balloon-surprised-its-creators

There is actually a desktop version with even more functionality (I used it for my dissertation research)

I'm going to shoot it down if you dare fly that thing over my house.

lmaaao imagine

"yo sleepy joe just a heads up the pipes to the northwest of Oregon base #4-A is fucked"

> Now that you know that atmospheric conditions are chaotic

They’re not at high altitude. They’re actually pretty stable.

> and that balloons have next to no steering capabilities

That’s not at all true…

> are you still convinced that China launched them so they can fly across the Pacific, through Canada, just so they fly visibly over precise sensitive locations in the US?

It’s been done many, many times before… the Japanese were doing it all the way back in WWII…

> Nobody is wasting money making spy balloons when satellites would’ve sufficed.

They don’t, actually. For camera or radio imaging, sure, but for signal scooping, you need to be in atmosphere due to the way radio waves reflect off the ionosphere. That’s why the US is flying radio signal intelligence aircraft in the Black Sea instead of just using satellites to intercept Russian radio communications and gather intelligence.

> It shouldn’t be hard to spot the military’s fear mongering.

Try being a little more educated before making wild assertions.

China: See it really is a weather balloon. And might I add that your lawn is looking really great this year, the flower bed your wife is adding right now really gives the property some pop, but the gardener has been hanging around too much….Hello?