Adventures in Wildfire Smoke Stratospheric Ballooning
NASA Science ·
The student ballooning team at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities went to work tracking the plume of a pyrocumulonimbus cloud. The post Adventures in Wildfire Smoke Stratospheric Ballooning appeared first on NASA Science .
By Varsha Balaji, Eleanor Brand, Lani Calderon, and Isaiah Theisen
The Smokestack team, University of Minnesota
A pyroCb generated by the Gold Mountain Fire in Colorado, June 30, 2026. National Weather Service Storm Prediction Center/Scott Stearns
Ballooning was popularized during the 1780s when the Montgolfier brothers drew crowds in France with their hot air balloons. In later times, balloons that could reach the stratosphere were tied to atmospheric science, military reconnaissance, and aerodynamic innovation. These days, stratospheric ballooning is used in meteorology and as a platform to conduct science experiments. These experiments can range from environmental temperature and pressure testing to atmospheric sampling to chemistry experiments and radio telemetry testing.
The Montgolfier brothers demonstrate their hot air balloon. Library of Congress
Our student ballooning team at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities does smaller-scale experiments using latex weather balloons. In the spring of 2025, National Institute of Aerospace (NIA) researcher Jean-Paul Vernier, from NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, reached out to James Flaten, associate director of NASA’s Minnesota Space Grant Consortium and University of Minnesota contract professor. Jean-Paul recruited James and his stratospheric ballooning team at University of Minnesota Twin Cities into NASA’s multi-year, nationwide INSPYRE (INjected Smoke and PYRocumulonimbus Experiment) campaign, specifically Jean-Paul’s project, the Balloon Network for Stratospheric Aerosol Observations (BalNeO).
Team members prepare a set of payloads in a “stack” for a balloon flight. Minnesota Space Grant Consortium/Monica Robles
Team members inflate a latex weather balloon before a flight. University of Minnesota/Isaiah Theisen
In August 2025, Jean-Paul visited the University of Minnesota campus to meet with James and five undergraduate ballooning students who were interested in what we now call the “Smokestack” project. On August 27, the first Smokestack test flight was conducted with in-person assistance from Jean-Paul. Students were tasked to launch, track, chase, and recover the balloon as well as to staff a ground station and retrieve transmitted sensor data. After that successful flight, the team conducted independent test flights and data analysis to prepare for the “real deal” in the summer of 2026, when wildfire season would start again.
Jean-Paul taught us about the equipment used for this program. Flight equipment includes an iMet radiosonde and a Vaisala radiosonde, which collect GPS and basic weather sensor data and transmit it to ground stations via telemetry radio. The payload box on the stack contains the Profiling Optical Particle Counter (POPC) which measures aerosol concentrations; it can track dust, pollution, volcanic plumes, and, in this case, wildfire smoke in the atmosphere. We also fly our own flight computer, the Pico Instrumentation and Control for Optimal Logging and Operations (PICOLO), to collect additional sensor data.
In spring 2026, mechanical engineer Rubel Das from NIA and NASA Langley also began supporting the Smokestack team with predictions for the movement of pyroCb smoke, working to figure out when and where to launch balloons that would intercept wildfire smoke plumes (often from Canada or the western U.S., sometimes from farther away, such as Siberia) as they cross over Minnesota.
The payload box contains the POPC (right), iMet radiosonde (white, bottom left), and PICOLO flight computer (upper left). The blue and yellow items are batteries. University of Minnesota/Eleanor Brand
Members of the Smokestack team at work in the field and the lab: [top left] Sean Gilomen (center) and Lani Calderon (right), aerospace engineering graduate students at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities (UMN-TC); [top right] Andrew Schmit, an undergraduate in aerospace engineering at UMN-TC; [center left] Jack Husemann, a senior meteorology student at St. Cloud State University; [center right] Varsha Balaji (front), an undergraduate in aerospace and mechanical engineering at UMN-TC and Eleanor “Ellie” Brand (rear), an undergraduate in aerospace engineering at UMN-TC; [bottom] Isaiah Theisen, a junior in mechanical engineering at UMN-TC who currently serves as the all-ballooning team and Smokestack sub-team student lead. Minnesota Space Grant Consortium
Isaiah sets up two ground stations before a Smokestack test flight. University of Minnesota/Varsha Balaji
We conducted several test flights over the 2025-2026 school year for the purpose of testing our equipment and preparing our team for the possibility of “real” (also known as “on-call”) flights to intercept smoke plumes. For test flights we prepared the payloads, radiosondes, and balloon exactly as we would for a real pyroCb flight. These flights helped us fine-tune our process and catch any mistakes we might have made otherwise.
Our first excitement of the summer came on July 15, 2026, when Jean-Paul contacted us about a pyroCb smoke plume that he and Rubel were tracking. They predicted that the plume was coming right over southern Minnesota! Geostationary satellite images confirmed that the plume was following the predicted path. With that confirmation, Rubel began running the beefier Langley Trajectory Model (LaTM) simulations to give us a more precise window of opportunity.
The LaTM trajectory prediction. The launch location we chose was near the border of Minnesota and Iowa. The blue circles represent the location of the BalNeO stations and the yellow and orange circles represent the area of operations of the NASA INSPYRE campaign. LaTM
Each additional simulation predicted the plume crossing Minnesota and we even got a visual clue: “I woke early, and I could see a red sun in front of me while taking my dog for a walk,” remarked Jean-Paul. Clearly, something was in the air, and Jean-Paul’s observation boded well for us: Virginia, where Jean-Paul lives, was in the path of the predicted trajectory the pyroCb plume would follow before it looped around toward Minnesota.
Our first official flight began with a 1 a.m. alarm. According to Rubel’s LaTM predictions, we had a small window to act. The plume was traveling over the southern border of Minnesota, a two-hour drive away, but would be gone by about 7 a.m. on Friday, July 17. So, toting the equipment we had calibrated and packed on Thursday afternoon, we arrived at the lab in the middle of the night to load everything into two rental vans.
Varsha’s whiteboard drawing planning for a balloon stack, called a “stack plan,” put together the day before the July 17 flight. University of Minnesota/Varsha Balaji
It was a peaceful drive to the launch site; not many people cruise the streets at 3 a.m.! We set up our equipment in a Walmart parking lot in Austin, Minnesota, with Isaiah and Lani assembling the ground stations and Ellie and Varsha prepping the POPC and the radiosondes for flight.
Isaiah [center] held onto the balloon during inflation to prevent it from floating away for our July 17 flight while Lani [left] and Ellie [right] stabilized it. Minnesota Space Grant Consortium/James Flaten
We dressed in our yellow fire-resistant hoodies and headlamps and inflated the balloon. Because launching during the night comes with extra regulations, we waited until the clock hit 5:10 a.m. to release the balloon, its recovery siren beeping as the stack soared above the parking lot and out of sight.
The ground station setup allows us to monitor the radiosondes during its flight. University of Minnesota/Eleanor Brand
During the flight Lani and Ellie stayed at the launch site to run the ground station, monitoring the radiosonde packets to ensure the POPC was collecting data. The mosquitos attacked in swarms, but the sunrise made it worth it!
Liftoff at daybreak from Austin, Minnesota University of Minnesota/Isaiah Theisen
Isaiah, Varsha, and James went chasing, but not without a quick breakfast stop first. They followed the trajectory of the balloon, cross-referencing the GPS location with the predicted trajectory, and arrived in time to watch the balloon land in a cornfield just over the border in northern Iowa at 7:20 a.m. Being able to arrive in time to watch a balloon that we had launched also land was a rare treat! Isaiah and Varsha waded through the wet stalks of corn, following the audio siren, and updated coordinates from the trackers, and recovered the payloads successfully.
Recovery of the payload in a cornfield. University of Minnesota/Isaiah Theisen
But finding the stack was only the beginning! We wouldn’t know until after we arrived back at the lab and extracted the data from the POPC whether or not we had intercepted the wildfire smoke plume. There was certainly anticipation in the air as we drove back to the Twin Cities, but it was dampened by the exhaustion of the early wake-up call.
At the lab, Isaiah downloaded the raw POPC and iMet data and ran it through a parser script created by Jean-Paul that combined the flight characteristics (such as altitude) of the iMet with the aerosol counts and concentrations from the POPC. Graphs revealed a massive spike in aerosol count and concentration between 5 and 6 miles (8 and 10 kilometers), the exact altitude range we had predicted the smoke would be in. We had intercepted our first wildfire smoke plume!
Concentrations of aerosols of various diameters (in micrometers) versus altitude. Notice the spike between 8 and 10 kilometers. This indicates that we managed to intercept the smoke plume with our payload as intended. University of Minnesota/Isaiah Theisen
In some ways, this first flight was also a test flight. It was preparation for higher-impact flights where we could coordinate operations and compare data with other projects studying atmospheric smoke, such as INSPYRE, and contribute even more to the small but growing knowledge of pyroCbs.
The second smoke plume we sampled originated from the Widemouth 2 wildfire in Utah. It had produced a pyroCb on August 2, over a week earlier, and the INSPYRE team had successfully flown their NCAR GV aircraft into the smoke plume the next day, collecting aerosol data between 39,000 and 44,000 feet (12 and 13 kilometers) in altitude. We felt that it was important to try to sample this same plume because NASA could benefit from seeing the evolution of aerosol concentration as the days went by. It was agreed that the plume had spread out so much that it would cover the entire southern half of Minnesota on the morning and afternoon of August 12.
The Smokestack team launched the balloon from Glencoe Silver Lake Public School. This launch presented a difficulty: we were without our professor! Nevertheless, after a slight struggle with getting our onboard flight computer working, we rigged up the stack, set up the ground stations, and inflated the balloon. At 12:20 p.m. local time, our stack was in the air with the POPC running and both radiosondes transmitting data.
Liftoff from Glencoe, Minnesota. University of Minnesota/Isaiah Theisen
The balloon was in the air for just over 2 hours, following a southeastern trajectory right into the plume, and reaching a maximum altitude of 102,000 feet (31 kilometers) before landing in a Wanamingo, Minnesota, soybean field not far from the road, making recovery easy.
Flight path of the August 12 flight, a distance of about 75 miles. APRS.fi
Back at the lab, our data analysis showed a spike in the aerosol concentration between 6 and 8 miles (9 and 13 kilometers), which meant that the smoke plume was likely caught. It was much less concentrated at the altitude that we caught it at, indicating that the plume itself was much older. It will require more work to fully verify the origin of the plume.
It was a great experience to have been able to sample the same smoke plume that the INSPYRE team had intercepted with their fixed-wing aircraft. While INSPYRE primarily uses aircraft to collect samples, there is a beauty in the simplicity of a stratospheric balloon. A balloon can go much higher than a traditional aircraft at a fraction of the cost. The goal of establishing the weather ballooning sub-team at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities was to aid INSPYRE researchers with data collection that happens with a quick turnaround.
Initial BalNeO station locations and results from early BalNeO flights. NASA/ Jean-Paul Vernier
Jean-Paul has previously set up BalNeO stations at universities in Bauru, Brazil; Reims, France; and Hyderabad, India. These universities similarly use optical particle counters on stratospheric balloons for measurements of aerosol concentrations. Together, we are forming a network of students hoping to support the INSPYRE mission.
With the 2026 wildfire season coming to an end, the team will be looking to tie up loose ends related to INSPYRE and refine our process for next year. The data collected so far has been posted and analyzed and sent to the researchers studying pyroCbs, aiding in the study of a smoke plume’s impact on the planet. In the off-season, the team will continue to be flight-ready by staging practice flights, making sure equipment is working properly, and watching developments of pyroCbs across the world.
The post Adventures in Wildfire Smoke Stratospheric Ballooning appeared first on NASA Science .