On Thursday, September 20, 2012 7:35:02 PM UTC-5, Eric Greenwell wrote:
On 9/20/2012 9:25 AM, Steve Leonard wrote: My biggest interest is in temperature versus altitude in the first 1KM to 1.5KM above the surface. This will let you know where the cap that might kill the day exists. I had started a project for this some years ago, and since the wind usually blows here in Kansas, I was looking to use a couple of kites to lift the package. It would always stay within the confines of the airport, and would have much lower recurring cost than a helium balloon. I would be intereted in a package that gets temperature and altitude either logged on board, or transmitted to a PC on the ground. And at $150 or so, I am very interested. Have you found the NWS lapse rate forecasts inadequate? http://rucsoundings.noaa.gov/ -- Eric Greenwell - Washington State, USA (change ".netto" to ".us" to email me)

Usually the soundings there are pretty good but we've also gone through spells where we had inversions that the models just weren't catching. Sometimes this has gone on for weeks, like for 2 or 3 weeks last June when the models were all predicting great soaring when in fact there was a hard inversion at about 5000 MSL and it totally sucked.

I think there is some real benefit to having actual measured real life data instead of a computer model. At 150 per unit, especially if you can reliably retrieve the transmitter, I think it would be worth it.