Weather decides whether (to launch)

With all the equipment pretty much ready to go, we are now at the mercy of the weather. Whilst rain is an issue - the wind is even more so. Our gas has to be ordered at least 24 hours before launch as the canister has to be hired by the week - which means we need to predict when we will have the right conditions. Just to make things that little bit more tricky, standard weather reports are of no use to us as surface winds give no indication of upper wind strength, or even direction!

We have access to a balloon flight prediction website (provided by Cambridge University) which gives forecasts for up to 120 hours ahead - but we cannot place complete faith in just this. Although many weather prediction models exist, none are accurate all of the time and often they models can disagree quite substantially.

Only a couple of models are available free to the public (most are expensive subscriptions): GFS, used by the aforementioned prediction website, and NOGAPS. The idea will be to combine the information from both models (which can be analysed for free on the US Navy's weather website) and using the website provided by CU.

At the moment the weekend doesn't look too promising, but I'll be checking later on as the models are re-run every six hours and drastic changes are not uncommon.