Talk:Ceiling balloon

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The article should say that there balloons are possibly dangerous for big fishes and dolphins. Indeed they may travel long distancec and once in the water look like food. --pippo2001 03:18, 4 August 2005 (UTC)

I wouldn't have thought they would travel far but they may react different in warmer climes. Do you have any info on this? I would have thought that Weather balloons were a bigger problem.CambridgeBayWeather 04:33, 4 August 2005 (UTC)

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This article needs more structure. It rambles and is somewhat monolithic. A description of the technology for inflating the ballon is interesting, but its place is secondary to purpose and method of finding the cloud base. Sendervictorius 08:53, 4 August 2005 (UTC)

some more structure would be nice! make a tecnical section "process of inflating the balloon" or whatever ... the idea "constant speed of balloon, measure time till invisible" is only in the very end! 4 August 2005

!@#54674#$%#@^

Article says: A ceiling balloon is a small, usually red, rubber balloon commonly measuring 76 mm (3 in) across.

So small? I would say it is 76cm. Saigon from europe 12:55, 4 August 2005 (UTC)

It refers to uninflated balloons. I changed the second sentence to reflect this. CambridgeBayWeather 13:32, 4 August 2005 (UTC)

volume @ pressure

I think the volume of gas, stated as 201 ft^3 @ 2000 psi, is wrong. If the cylinder were 5 ft tall, it would need to be 7 ft in diameter. I think it's something like 1.5 ft^3 @ 2000 psi, which corresponds to 201 ft^3 @ 14.7 psi. I don't know that much about gas cylinders so I could be wrong.

The metric figures are correct as per the Environment Canada manual. I may have made an error in the conversion but I tried several different converters and they all give 201 ft³CambridgeBayWeather 14:53, 4 August 2005 (UTC)

I have changed to article to reflect the 5 cu m being at STP, but compressed at 2000psi into the storage cyl. Rich Farmbrough 19:53, 4 August 2005 (UTC)

What's specific to Ceiling balloons?

There's an awful lot of description of the inflation equipment. How is it different from the equipment used to inflate other types of balloons used in meteorology? Party balloons? Is it important that the balloons are stored in a wall-mounted cabinet? Why not on a tabletop? --Theodore Kloba 21:44, August 4, 2005 (UTC)

I put the description in because I thought it fit and didn't know where else to put it. The only other major use of balloons in meteorology is with hydrogen and that is very different (lot more safety features). I'm not sure about party balloons. Do you think it would be better in a seperate article on various types of balloon inflation? The main reason for having the balloons in a cabinet is to stop people from stealing them. If you leave them out pilots and the airport manager will take off with them. Also if they are not in the proper place then I can't find them (some days I can't even find the helium). I suspect another reason we keep them there is because one day Environment Canada said here's a place to store the balloons and we've done it that way ever since!CambridgeBayWeather 06:16, 5 August 2005 (UTC)

I guess it just seems to me that the balloons' function in weather measurement (and the physical principle behind that function) is the most important and should be mentioned first. The other details belong further down in the article. It looks like copyediting has already begun... --Theodore Kloba 14:22, August 5, 2005 (UTC)

Hydrogen or Helium

The article states "The gas used to fill the balloon is helium or hydrogen.". Given that the balloon is calibrated for a fixed ascent rate, doubling the density (from H₂ to He) is surely not possible (unless there is a different calibrated ascent rate for operation with helium). Is helium really used? If so, why? FredV (talk) 19:51, 16 September 2011 (UTC)