Weather balloon creates an atmosphere of fear

Panic gripped the residents of Bola village, near Belmannu in Karkala taluk, on Saturday when a few passers-by noticed a suspicious object with a battery abandoned near a house.

The house belonged to one Kishor Moolya.

Karkala Rural police were in a fix when the residents informed them of a bomb.Later, it turned out to be a weather balloon of the Meteorological Department.

Sources in Meteorological department said that it was RSG-20 GPS Radiosonde with a battery-powered telemetry instrument carried into the atmosphere usually by a weather balloon that measures various atmospheric parameters and transmits them to a ground receiver.

This balloon with a device is released in the morning daily and all necessary precautions are taken. These weather balloons go up in the stratosphere and pose no risk to aircrafts, sources added. It is like a parachute and it collects details about the weather in the region.

The balloon carries meteorological sensors in it which relays back weather data to the ground station in Mangaluru.

Data on temperature, atmospheric pressures, humidity is received through it. The white colour balloon had got stuck on the top of a coconut tree. Usually this object falls into the sea. In rare occasions, it falls in the residential areas, sources said. The police arrived immediately and cleared the doubts of the people.