Weather Balloon Visualization

As part of an engineering project in high school, we created a weather balloon and sent it 20 miles into the sky with GPS and thermometers to record temperature and position over time. Once this project was completed, and we had all this data which tracked millions of seconds over the 2 hour journey of the balloon, it was now a question of what to do with it. At first I though it would be good to visualize the data using simple 2D graphs but then I realized that could be missing the full view. I created an environment to plot this data in Blender with a script that created a line tracking the course of the balloon. I then gave this line show width and color coded it according to the temperature. This was cool because it shows how the balloon hit a cold and hot spot as it rose through the clouds. To make an animation out of this data, I used the speed of the balloon from the data to unveil that part of the line over time. After uploading a 3D topographical map of the Delmarva region in which the balloon flew, I could show the balloon rising over the state of MD and crash landing in Northern VA.

Check out the animation on YouTube here.