You know those little paratrooper guys that you could throw up into the air and their chutes would open and float to the ground. Well, a dropsonde is like that little paratrooper dude but is a cardboard tube with a GPS, a radio transmitter, and a bunch of weather sensors. The airplane flys really high up and they drop the sonde out the bottom of the plane. It floats down with its chute and collects weather data that is then sent to the plane that then sends it to the weathermen at the Hurricane Center in Florida.
teh_Rabbit25 karma
You know those little paratrooper guys that you could throw up into the air and their chutes would open and float to the ground. Well, a dropsonde is like that little paratrooper dude but is a cardboard tube with a GPS, a radio transmitter, and a bunch of weather sensors. The airplane flys really high up and they drop the sonde out the bottom of the plane. It floats down with its chute and collects weather data that is then sent to the plane that then sends it to the weathermen at the Hurricane Center in Florida.
For a non-five year old write up go here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dropsonde
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