this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2025
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submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 5 days ago) by xkcdbot@lemmy.world to c/xkcd@lemmy.world
 

xkcd #3107: Weather Balloons

Title text:

Once you add the balloons into the model, it makes forecasting easier overall--the forecast is always 'cold and dark, with minimal solar-driven convection.'

Transcript:

[A graph is shown. The X axis is labeled Number of Weather Balloon Launches Per Day. It's logarithmic, with ticks in powers of 10, and values shown at 1, 10, 100, 1,000, 1 million, 1 billion, and 1 trillion. The Y axis is labeled Weather Model Accuracy, no values are shown. The plot starts above the mark for 1 balloon, at about 40% of the maximum value of the curve, it quickly rises through a point labelled "Current Rate", at about 4000 launches per day and 85% of the maximum. The maximum value is reached at 100 million, plateaus until 10 billion, and then reduces even more rapidly down to perhaps 15% maximum accuracy above the 10 trillion mark.]

Source: https://xkcd.com/3107/

explainxkcd for #3107

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[โ€“] Steve@communick.news 19 points 1 week ago

Seems like a climate change proposal to me ๐Ÿ‘

[โ€“] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 14 points 1 week ago (3 children)

I'm going to need someone to adjust the model for instances in which an F-22 starts shooting them down.

[โ€“] ValiantDust@feddit.org 13 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

"Dabei war'n dort am Horizont
Nur 99 Luftballons."

[โ€“] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

dramatically removes sunshades
dear god.. the balloons are gay..

[โ€“] tate@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 1 week ago (4 children)

All the fighter jets in the world couldn't make a tiny dent in one trillion balloons.

[โ€“] Alexstarfire@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[โ€“] tate@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

It looks like the dart took out about a half dozen lights and a dozen people in about two seconds, so let's say 10 strikes per second. At that rate it would take 10^11 seconds to pop a trillion balloons. That's more than 3000 years!

Of course I did say "make a tiny dent," but even to eliminate 0.1% of the balloons would take the dart 3 years. One trillion is a number that we use a lot, for example talking about the US national debt, but it is not an ordinary number that lends itself to intuitive understanding. Even a billion is hard to grasp intuitively.

[โ€“] Alexstarfire@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

Let's just light the atmosphere on fire. Sounds like the quickest solution. Surely there can't be any downsides.

[โ€“] SubArcticTundra@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I'd just shoot doem down with FLAC cannons

[โ€“] ayyy@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 week ago

Good idea using the Free Lossless Audio Codec that will sound way better than mp3 when the balloons all pop.

[โ€“] AmidFuror@fedia.io 1 points 1 week ago

We need more jets right away!

[โ€“] Deceptichum@quokk.au 1 points 1 week ago

Not if we build it one trillion of them.

[โ€“] PodPerson@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 week ago

How about when an unhinged person in the White House starts defunding NWS and launches get cancelled (yes - happening already).

[โ€“] EarMaster@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

We launch over a thousand weather balloons per day?

[โ€“] Deebster@infosec.pub 3 points 5 days ago

It seems reasonable given that ~~space~~ the atmosphere is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is.

[โ€“] NigelFrobisher@aussie.zone 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

My first thought was โ€œwhoโ€™s launching all these leather balloons?โ€.

kinky scientists

[โ€“] ksigley@lemm.ee 2 points 1 week ago

There really is an xkcd for everything.