Uncontrolled
Network
This page includes a movie that shows the trajectories
of 100 balloons floating in the natural winds at 35
km altitude. On this page and following pages (see links
at bottom), each balloon is shown as a red dot. Tails
extend behind the balloons for 3 days, and alternating
black and red colors indicate one-day intervals. All
balloons are held at 35 km altitude for the duration
of the simulation. All simulations start at 1992-11-10T00:00:00
and use the UKMO assimilation environment.
All simulations start with the same initial, randomized
network where every balloon has at least 1.5x106 m separation
distance from its nearest neighbor. There are 4 hours
of time between frames of the movies.
This 120-day free-floating simulation shows that voids
and clusters of balloons appear, indicating the need
for coordinated trajectory control of individual balloons.
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