by Jim Isler

hether it is eastern religion or merely good ballooning, Appropriate Aerostation places you completely in the environment. Observation, then reflection upon what you have observed, will provide clues not available to the ordinarily competent balloonist.

My serious objective is to show you a way to improve your piloting skills, win more competitions, if that’s your thing, and increase your passengers’ confidence that you know what you are doing. Crew members can benefit too, by becoming better able to anticipate just where their balloon is going.

The popular perception of meditation is sitting cross-legged on the floor, eyes closed, reciting "OMMMMM", slowing your bodily processes to permit yourself to achieve some cosmic consciousness. I’ve never had the patience to do this, but adherents swear by it, and half the world practices it. With that kind of an endorsement, there must be value. Our meditation plan goes toward the same objective- higher consciousness-but we do it standing up, out of doors, during inflation.

Appropriate Aerostatic Meditation should become a checklist item. A checklist helps insure that those things essential to launch and flight HAVE BEEN DONE. There are two reasons why this meditation should be on the checklist: first, aviation permits of few errors; and second, introducing a new element, meditation, risks being forgotten if you don’t check having done it. The idea is to do certain things which will make you aware of the morning, and better prepared to anticipate what will happen to you and your balloon.

What are the cosmic forces at work on our ballooning situation and what influences do we have on them? The short answer is 3 cosmic forces, and we have no influence. An airplane, through its power, can effectively make adjustments in the other three dimensions, and overcome the cosmic forces.

Figure 1: Larkspur, Colorado area topography map

Figure 4 - Right: Topo map, with the drainage drawn in. The Plum Creek airflow is the easy one to spot. Riding the drainage a mile, we enter open land, more importantly the large part of the valley sloping up to our right. The cool air there will be moving down toward the creek, just as the hills to the west are heating up. It is like one bubble pushing on another one bending the drainage to the west. Multiple drainages get really complicated in the mountains, but they are usually simpler, and just as important, on the flatland.
Figure 3 - Left: As the sun rises, look at the change in distance through the atmo-sphere each photon has to travelit gets shorter, shorter and shorter. Warmer, warmer and warmer. A little later in the morning it doesn't take as much change in angle (time) to enhance the effect of those earlier rays which took the chill off. We'll see some predictable effects. Where, for instance, will the thermals form sooner, even though it is the same length of time after "official sunrise"?
Micrometeorology is the knowledge of both small effects, and local effects. It studies the airflow in a small area, driven by predictable interaction of the three cosmic forces: the sun, the topography, and the air itself.

All forms of aviation are influenced by geographic features and by the weather. My thesis is that weather is less relevant to the balloonist. Weather tells us whether or not to get out of bed. A different set of phenomena govern our actual flight. They are the interaction of place, time of day, and what the locals call weather. Given that we only go out on what most people would call good days, our microscope must look differently at weather than most aviators.

After the decision is made to go, the most important published weather data governing our flight becomes the variety of atmospheric pressure readings distributed around our weather country, that area within 25 to 50 miles of the launch site.

In some locations, it will be helpful to get pressure readings from a much broader area. If FSS tells me that a front is going to pass through my area in a couple of hours, I stay home. If they expect the front much later, I look at pressure readings and make a mental picture of the isobars. For example, if the readings at Grand Junction (200 miles west), Cheyenne (100 miles north), Pueblo (70 miles south), and Goodland, KS (150 miles east) are within 0.1 mb (i.e. 29.8-29.9), we can trust the "less than 10 knots" forecast. Along the Colorado Front Range, we have wide differences in winds at sunup owing to the drainage phenomena. Most disappear as the morning wears on. The "real" wind, the product of the prevailing weather system, comes up around 10 or 11 AM.

Terminal weather reports and forecasts are concerned with weather around the airport. Since their job is to assist in safe landings, that is what you would expect. But balloonists do not land at airports. In fact, we usually try to avoid them! In addition, these reports do not consider winds below 10-15 knots of much significance for normal airport traffic. But, these slow winds are the life blood of ballooning. The idea is to use one’s experience and knowledge of the larger weather patterns to develop an expectation of weather effects in one’s flying neighborhood.

In the environs of Denver, Colorado, we are influenced by the Rocky Mountains to the west, and the vast prairie sloping downward to the east. We look for flat pressure gradients, as everyone does, but the most important readings are those from north, south, and east. There can be vast differences 75 or 100 miles west of us which will have little influence on the next three or four hours. (At this point we are past the go/no go decision. A fast moving low pressure line from our west will keep us in bed, or retire us to the pizza joint early in the evening.)

Appropriate Aerostatic Truth is found in the interaction of fluid, flowing air, the ground over which it passes-its riverbed, and the angle and intensity of the sunlight. Air differs in density over time, its compression level. Air has weight, differing with its density, and it flows like any other liquid. For ground, we need a topographic map. Figure 1 is a simplified topographic map of the Larkspur, Colorado area, thirty miles south of Denver. It has all the characteristics and complexity I need in an area of 20 square miles. Most flying situations are much simpler.

In large scale, the air at Larkspur flows north toward the Platte Valley. We have some large buttes to our south, and the Front Range is 10-20 miles to the west. To the east we have a mesa formation, opening to prairie farther east; to the north, a wide valley on up to Castle Rock. There’s a creek, Plum Creek, running north, but it carries little water. Instead it is the bed for a river of air. We are north of the Palmer Divide that separates the drainages of the Platte and Arkansas Rivers, so we can expect the river of air to flow north with the creek.

All night long, as the air cooled, it became more dense. As its weight piled up, it began to flow, slowly. Think of the air mass as slime poured from a cosmic cup. That flow, imperceptible at first, becomes drainage in the morning, when it is really moving. Drainage can be slow or fast, narrow or broad, shallow or "deep" (meaning moderately high).

In a typical morning flight, the sun rises a few minutes late at the Larkspur launch site, owing to Larkspur Butte immediately to the east. The angle and intensity of the sun are important. Let’s look at our topography in profile, instead of from the sky.(Figure 2) As the sun comes up, notice that Old Sol gets to work on the prairie for several minutes before he spots our launch site. His early rays are at a low angle, and they must travel a longer way through the atmosphere, cooling as they go, so their early effect is minimal, but still present. Note that they warm the air more than the earth.

As the sun rises, look at the change in distance through the atmosphere each photon has to travel-it gets shorter, shorter and shorter. Warmer, warmer and warmer. A little later in the morning it doesn’t take as much change in angle (time) to enhance the effect of those earlier rays which took the chill off. We’ll see some predictable effects. Where, for instance, will the thermals form sooner, even though it is the same length of time after "official sunrise"?

There is another effect of those low angle rays. Look at the mountains, standing there as a wall. Is the light going over them, as it did the prairie? Nope. It hits them and stops right there, exhausting its energy in warming the rocks and rills, and what is left of the cool night air above them.

Let’s look again at our topo map, this time with the drainage drawn in. The Plum Creek airflow is the easy one to spot. What else will there be? Riding the drainage a mile, we enter open land, more importantly the large part of the valley sloping up to our right. The cool air there will be moving down toward the creek, just as the hills to the west are heating up. It is like one bubble pushing on another one-bending the drainage to the west. Multiple drainages get really complicated in the mountains, but they are usually simpler, and just as important, on the flatland.

Winning a balloon competition is only one reason for truly understanding what’s happening. There is extreme pleasure in the professionalism of truly piloting your balloon.

Next month we will take a look at the "Albuquerque Box" and meditation techniques.