RESEARCHERS from the university of used a balloon to collect unusual weather data during the eclipse event yesterday.
Peter Gibbs, former Met Office and BBC weather man as well as visiting fellow at the University of Reading, joined Professor Giles Harrison in gathering data during the eclipse.
Together they are leading a project in Austin, Texas, where they launched a balloon designed to collect data from specially designed instruments.
A sensor capsule was attached to detect the reduction levels of sunlight and motion in the atmosphere related to the event.
It was also fitted with a two-camera system to capture a video of the moon’s shadow travelling across the Earth, which moves at about 1500mph.
It follows reports of a “strange wind” by celebrated astronomer Edmund Halley during the total solar eclipse of 1715.
These reports were mirrored by British observers three hundred years later and 4,500 volunteers helped the National Eclipse Weather Experiment meteorologists at the University of Reading work out why.
Speaking in 2016, Professor Harrison explained that the sudden cooling of the ground, similar to the effect of sunset, which means warm air stops rising from the ground.
This causes a change in direction of the wind as well as a drop in speed.
Professor Harrison said: “A total solar eclipse is a rare and special thing – a sort of natural experiment – and I’ve tried various ways of measuring their effects since the UK solar eclipse of 1999.
“The national citizen science experiment for the 2015 eclipse was particularly valuable in helping understand effects on the weather-forming regions of the atmosphere.
“In 2015 we coordinated three modified weather balloons aloft simultaneously at Reading, Lerwick and Reykjavik, which successfully measured the eclipse-induced sunlight changes by being above the clouds.”
He explained: “At the University of Reading, we use weather balloons for all sorts of things including learning more about summertime storms, but eclipse monitoring is an unusual use.
“The next total solar eclipse will be in 2026 and only be visible in Iceland, Greenland and Spain.
“Hence this eclipse presented a valuable opportunity to obtain some new atmosphere data.”
