Nationwide Eclipse Ballooning Project: Studying the atmospheric impacts of solar eclipses with frequent weather balloon flights

The total solar eclipse (TSE) provides a rare life-altering opportunity to attract, inspire and enable the next-generation of observational scientists, and an ideal “laboratory” for students to learn, explore and perform research in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). Building on the highly successful NASA and NSF-sponsored Nationwide Eclipse Ballooning Project (NEBP) implemented during the 2017, 2019, and 2020 TSEs, the new NEBP was funded in 2021 by the NASA Science Mission Directorate (SMD) Science Activation (SciAct) program. The overarching goal of NEBP 2022-2025 is to broaden participation of STEM learners by immersing teams from a wide range of higher education institutions in an innovative NASA-mission-like adventure in data acquisition and analysis through scientific ballooning during the 10/14/2023 annular and 4/8/2024 total solar eclipses. NEBP include 53 student teams with 750+ participants from 75 institutions. Of the 75 NEBP participating institutions, more than 30% are Minority Serving Institutions and 15% are Community Colleges.

NEBP includes two learner-centered activity tracks – engineering and atmospheric science. The atmospheric science (AS) track, the focus of this talk, includes 19 teams and 200+ participants. At sites along the path of totality, NEBP AS teams will make frequent observations by flying hourly or less radiosondes on weather balloons to 100,000 - 110,000 feet along with high-temporal resolution surface meteorological data before, during, and after the eclipse. The AS track has educational, scientific and outreach goals. Each participating institution is encouraged to offer courses to teach and train students in solar eclipses, scientific ballooning, field campaigns, radiosondes, data analysis and so on (see detailed course materials on https://eclipse.montana.edu/education/sciencecourse.html). Further training is completed by conducting field campaigns, analyzing the data and publishing the scientific results. Scientifically, the collected data will be used by mentors and students to study the surface and boundary layer responses to solar eclipses, eclipse-induced gravity waves and other topics. The collected data will also be available to the public for future research such as validating and improving weather and climate models for better forecasting and predictions to better protect people and properties. Each team will also conduct a series of outreach activities during the field campaigns including lectures, demonstrations of weather balloon launches and hands-on activities.