TOPEKA, Kan. -- At the National Weather Service in Topeka, all eyes are trained on Hurricane Irma.
While there's sophisticated equipment at their disposal, at this office and 69 others across the country they're using a simple tool to help generate computer models of Irma's trajectory.
It's called a Radiosonde. The unit measures temperature, humidity, and wind speeds once it's tied to a weather balloon.
"It's really the best way we have right now to get all this information," Brandon Drake, an NWS Topeka meteorologist, told 41 Action News.
The team usually deploys the unit twice a day, but because of Irma they've doubled the number of launches.
"The GPS instrument inside is what triangulates the wind data speed," Drake said.
"It’s simple but it's very important information because the temperature and wind profile through the atmosphere is pretty much what drives everything, and that's how the models are initialized and it's very important to put accurate data in there," Brian Walawender, another NWS Topeka meteorologist, said.
Once the instrument goes through preflight check, the meteorologists head to the launch site to inflate the balloon with hydrogen. The process takes about 10 minutes before it's time for take-off.
Although it's only five feet in diameter on the ground, once the weather balloon reaches 100,000 feet in altitude its diameter will expand to 25 feet. Some airline pilots have described it as a small floating house.
And not every flight is smooth. Meteorologists in Corpus Christi had a tough time with their launches as Hurricane Harvey moved in.
When it's up it begins transmitting information in real time.
"Once it's finished there's an encoded message that we send out, and it goes directly ingested into the computer models or the next computer model run," Walawender said.
In the region, the National Weather Service launches weather balloons in Springfield, Missouri and in Omaha, Nebraska but not out of the Kansas City office in Pleasant Hill.
