Simulations

We will be launching the balloon in Eastern Washington. Just to get an idea of how far the balloon might travel, I decided to run a sample scenario or two through the balloon trajectory forecast site. I then took the .kml file that is generated and loaded it up in google earth. The result of the simulation shows that it travelled roughly 100 miles:


I was curious how close the impact was to a road, and what kind of terrain it was shown to have landed in. Zooming in closer showed that it was right in the middle of the river, just about the only water around. What are the chances of that? :)




I intend to run this simulation daily for a while to get a better idea of the range and direction we will need to go for retrieval. After having run a few more, the balloon has always traveled East 80-120 miles. It will be interesting to see if that is generally the case.