Meteo France has a weather station on Mangareva and I’ve always wanted to go to see the process.  It was a little anticlimactic, but cool none the less.  Every day at 1400 they release a weather balloon in 4 weather stations.  Gambier, Marquesas, Australs, and Tahiti.  They also have stationary, automatic weather sites but they are not truly weather stations as there are no people.

One employee puts out the modem box which has all the sensors (temperature, wind, barometric pressure, GPS, etc…) about 20 minutes before the weather balloon launch.  We could not go into the area where he inflates the balloon but assume its like any other inflation (smiley face).

The employee attaches the balloon to the modem box and unceremoniously lets it go.  No big aha moment or “ta da” or anything.

It was a slightly windy day so the weather balloon took off rather quickly.

Weather Balloon

The weather balloon is about 1 meter in diameter when it is launched and expands to become larger than a house.  It will continue to slowly expand as it climbs up, up, into the sky.  It will continue to ascend until 30 kilometers (21 miles) before it explodes. 

The temperature was -11 at 6 kilometers!  Man, that is cold!

The data collected by the weather balloon is transmitted by satellite to the local weather station, then transmitted to Papeete (where all the weather is collected and centralized) and then sent to Paris – Meteo France (weather).

Each modem costs approximately 18000xpf (pacific francs) which is about $180.00.

Views from the weather station which is situated about 1/4 of the way up a mountain.

On the way back to town, I captured the view of the Rikitea Anchorage (at Mangareva).  Can you find Sugar Shack?

In our last blog post, we bring you into our many boat projects..  Events from this blog post occurred in January.  Our blog posts run 10-12 weeks behind our adventures.