Definitely. Programs such as Google's Project Loon used altitude to access different wind profiles so that they could plan & control the balloons' paths. You see this a lot with hot air balloons: The wind at one altitude can be going the opposite direction than the wind a few hundred feet below.
It would provide a better representation of the ability to steer the balloon.
As it is now, it suggests "you launch it and it goes somewhere randomly." But if you were able to demonstrate that it is able to steer by changing its altitude it becomes more clear that overflying an area can be a deliberate act.
Additionally, the data of "here is the current vector map for the winds at some altitude" doesn't handle the forecast of what they will be at a different location in 6 hours.
Having this as a game with "overfly these cities and score points" combined with using one month's worth of wind data and forecast information for 6h and 12h from now (rather than a point in time) would be more accurate for what it can do.
On one hand, yes controlling altitude will provide better results. One quirk of balloons is that winds can move at dramatically different directions/speeds at different altitudes.
On the other hand, this seems to be a solo developer working on something for the pure challenge of it. Adding different altitudes would have dramatically increased both the work and money required to build/display this.
In other words, adding features might make it more useful if you’re purely interested in accurately forecasting balloon flight. But prematurely adding features might mean that we wouldn’t have gotten to play with it now. Would that really be an improvement? Who knows?
If you want to accurately forecast balloon flight, there are already built resources for you. But this is hacker news, let’s leave those concerns for another time and celebrate hacking.
OP, I dig balloons. This simulation isn’t perfect but you have done some really good work. Keep at it!!
If you know more than others, that's great, but then please either (1) share some of what you know, so the rest of us can learn; or (2) don't post. Supercilious putdowns only make things worse.
But it's not a shallow dismissal. It gives a feedback of a particular shortcoming that makes the whole idea very misleading -- imagine a journalist making a conclusion that there's no way a baloon could fly over US territory based on such or similar simulation.
It's possible to fix that shortcoming and make the idea useful.
It was shallow in the sense that it didn't explain why. When people post comments that simply dismiss what someone else has done without being explaining why or teaching the reader, that's what we mean by shallow dismissal.
Both your comment and the GP's follow-up do contain a little more explanation—that's good—but even better would be to give more: walk us through what the issue is here, why it matters, and what an improvement would look like.
If you just focus on what you don't like about something, how useless or dumb it is, that puts a nasty torque on conversation which is hard to get out of.
> It was shallow in the sense that it didn't explain why
I was a passenger in a car en route to a funeral. I felt like the post was a little troublesome and I provided what context I could in the limited time I had to reply.
I do wish I had said "deeply misleading" instead of "useless", though. Which-- deeply misleading is even worse than useless, unfortunately.
> walk us through what the issue is here, why it matters, and what an improvement would look like.
In this case, there's a state actor (China) deliberately conflating weather balloons and surveillance craft. Typical weather balloons drift freely and cannot maneuver; capable balloons that can control their altitude can maneuver far more freely than most people expect. "Narrative" may sound sinister, but we have a deliberate counterfactual being used in the furtherance of surveillance and geopolitical conflict.
In turn, we have this "Spy Balloon Simulator - With real atmospheric data" that makes it pretty much impossible to control a balloon. It may be an accidental misstep, but it's at the very least a somewhat dangerous one.
The problem is, this “simulator” leads to very misleading conclusions because of the inability to control altitudes. It potentially fuels a false narrative that balloons drift at random and are not useful for surveillance, while Loon flew something like 40 balloons in a row to dwell over South America for sustained periods.
I’m sorry that the dismissal was short, but I did name the key problem.
If you had posted this in the first place it would have been better. Better yet would be to drop provocations like "false narrative", which implies something sinister, and just focus on contributing correct, interesting information about balloons (or whatever the topic is that you know about).
It's too easy to underestimate the impact of putdowns in internet comments—impact on the readers, on other commenters, on the site as a whole, and (if they see it) on the author or creator. When you* post putdowns it usually feels innocuous, as if you're just adding a little extra emphasis, but to the reader it often comes across as much larger than the rest of the comment put together—especially when there isn't much other information.
* I don't mean you personally of course—I mean all of us.
A more useful observation would be that without the ability to control altitude, it misleads the unknowledgeable to make erroneous conclusions about the capability of high altitude balloons to follow predetermined flight paths.
Or you could just call it what it is: A toy using a misleading description ("With real atmospheric data") that doesn't tell people its a toy. Perhaps its to be expected considering the fact that its a simple website, but still.
EDIT: I just realized the author made an account to clarify in this thread that its a toy application.
Only fun thing I found to do with this is race two cities' balloons around the world and back to original longitude. DC comes from behind and beats NY (at least at precise locations I selected).
interesting - what is the confidence interval on this? if you start a balloon in the same spot at the same time does it always end up in the same place? or is there a wide range of where it could be
My (uninformed!) suspicion is that the confidence interval has to be very wide.
I’m worried about things like: the size and weight of the balloon, the altitude of the balloon, and very difficult to predict future changes in wind speed and direction during the course of the balloon’s flight.
Without any context on the page, my first impression is this is presented as a tool for people to validate certain theories such as "could a balloon released from china at some recent time and date have actually blown into the US?"
As other comments have pointed out, the lack of ability to test with different altitudes makes the tool unfit for that purpose.
That leaves an open question of what the creator is hoping people will see in this. Is it a game or toy? Is it a technical experiment? Is it art? Does the maker not care what it is to us? (but, still, I'm curious what it is to the maker)
Certainly one can think of obvious improvements - which I generally think is a sign that a tool has a lot of potential. I would put it somewhere between art and educational tool: I hadn't really thought that much about how far a balloon could drift in a given time period and this did kind of make me realize that they move pretty "fast" - around the world in 80 days? How about 80 hours.
Sometimes you just have time to make a think that has the potential to provoke further discussion and interest - which seems like what happened here.
It is what you believe it to be (most of the time politically). People use it prove the theory. Other people use it to disprove. I can only see the fun with technicality on using the real data to simulate this.
Also, they said the balloon had "limited steering capability" which I assume means it could nudge itself in a direction or at least adjust it's altitude.
> To identify helpful wind patterns, Loon used advanced predictive models to create interactive maps of the skies. These maps allowed the team to determine the wind speed and direction at specific altitudes, times, and locations. The team then developed smart algorithms to help determine the most effective flight paths through the varying wind layers. With the aid of these algorithms, the balloons could accurately sail the winds over thousands of kilometers to reach a desired location and remain clustered around those destinations in order to deliver consistent connectivity below.
> It is possible for the balloon to change its altitude and then pick up different wind directions and velocities.
I've tried multiple different levels from 090 to 520, and it seems the deviation within level is extremely minimal.
i.e. maybe a difference between 70deg and 75deg, but if it's going in the general direction of east, there's not an altitude to turn around or even sidetrack.
Airships like a Zeppelin or blimp have some propulsive component to them that let them navigate without the wind.
A balloon can only navigate by catching different winds at different altitudes. When you can control the altitude from 60,000 feet to 120,000 feet there is a significant amount of variation in the direction of winds.
Can’t give an answer but my thought here is that this thing probably would like to be swept up before the news cycle turns and balloons aren’t a thing anymore. Looks and feels like something put together in a bit of a hurry (which is perfectly fine)
to answer everyone's questions:
1. it is supposed to be a for fun sandbox, a 'toy' if you may
2. it can in no way become a credible source for any level of military intel
3. the altitude is at 100hPa
4. I really should add a disclaimer about how this is for fun purposes only
5. adding othe levels will give me even more data chunks, but it is certainly doable
6. I want to add (programmable) steering too! will do soon
at around 60 deg south there is no land at all, causing the wind and sea current to be exteremly strong, meaning the balloon can 'circumnavigate' the globe in time as little as 5 days, it is also known as the screaming sixties
Isn't the actual distance to cover much shorter also at those latitudes, in order to 'circumnavigate' the globe? Because an equilatitude circle is much smaller.
Correct. Look at the specifics for Burt Rutan's Voyager world-record non-stop heavier-than-air circumnavigation. They specified the need to cross the equator twice in order to avoid such shenanigans, perhaps with a few more constraints.
A little bit of UX feedback: It would be great if the balloon were a draggable object, not just click once & then again, I tried to do this about 10 times before I realized: click once on the balloon and then again on the map! Or maybe edit the instructions (click balloon and then map).
Either way, I enjoyed this greatly! Thank you for building this.
I love the disclaimer "not a credible source for military intel". I know you are probably putting that to disclaim knowing where a particular balloon came from but it sounds a bit like "If you want to spy on another country, build your own simulator" - lol.
I’m having an absolutely awful day. My Dad had to call 911 to get my stepmother the care she needed and everything just went downhill from there.
As rough as my day has been, I have spent a lot of time with your app today. It’s not perfect (of course) but I have had a lot of fun with it today. As dark as today has been, that really means a lot.
You have gotten some really solid feedback today and I can’t disagree with it. But speaking as a user, this product has made my day significantly better. Thanks for putting this out into the world.
I wonder if there is a way to simulate a balloon in reverse, i.e. given its destination figure out which sources it could come from. Maybe it would just be a matter of reversing the winds and time? Would be interesting if it were doable.
This was really fun to mess about with. Interesting how some balloons take very similar paths for a bit, but then go on an entirely separate second stage. UK and Norway can follow a very similar path to get to the US, but then Norway's loops around Canada for a bit while the UK's head south. It's fascinating.
If you're bored and want to run mass simulations with your data I'd love to know which country is the hardest to spy on via balloon.
You should be aware that it is possible to direct your balloon pretty much anywhere by just changing the altitude.
If I was China and I wanted to make super advanced balloon to spy on US I would definitely make it so that it can use air currents at different altitudes to direct it where I want.
It's interesting because climate modeling/forecasting with a very powerful computer could tell you where and when to drop your balloon to pass certain targets.
Floats all the way around the world before passing within a few hundred feet of the start point. I was quite surprised when the second launch I tried turned up an (almost) eigenfloater of the matrix.
update: I have now added a disclaimer that this site is aimed at for fun usage only, in case we would scream at each other over the topic of fidelity and application
Q: How would we differentiate between a spy balloon and a weather balloon?
A: Well, it's not really possible - the NRO (the highly secretive US satellite agency) makes a lot of geospatial data available to scientists for use in studying everything from forest fires to fault geology to ocean ecosystem productivity and beyond.
109 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 131 ms ] threadhttps://x.company/projects/loon/
As it is now, it suggests "you launch it and it goes somewhere randomly." But if you were able to demonstrate that it is able to steer by changing its altitude it becomes more clear that overflying an area can be a deliberate act.
Additionally, the data of "here is the current vector map for the winds at some altitude" doesn't handle the forecast of what they will be at a different location in 6 hours.
Having this as a game with "overfly these cities and score points" combined with using one month's worth of wind data and forecast information for 6h and 12h from now (rather than a point in time) would be more accurate for what it can do.
On one hand, yes controlling altitude will provide better results. One quirk of balloons is that winds can move at dramatically different directions/speeds at different altitudes.
On the other hand, this seems to be a solo developer working on something for the pure challenge of it. Adding different altitudes would have dramatically increased both the work and money required to build/display this.
In other words, adding features might make it more useful if you’re purely interested in accurately forecasting balloon flight. But prematurely adding features might mean that we wouldn’t have gotten to play with it now. Would that really be an improvement? Who knows?
If you want to accurately forecast balloon flight, there are already built resources for you. But this is hacker news, let’s leave those concerns for another time and celebrate hacking.
OP, I dig balloons. This simulation isn’t perfect but you have done some really good work. Keep at it!!
The variability of wind direction at different altitudes can be seen at https://www.aviationweather.gov/windtemp and https://www.aviationweather.gov/windtemp/data?region=slc
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If you know more than others, that's great, but then please either (1) share some of what you know, so the rest of us can learn; or (2) don't post. Supercilious putdowns only make things worse.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
It's possible to fix that shortcoming and make the idea useful.
Both your comment and the GP's follow-up do contain a little more explanation—that's good—but even better would be to give more: walk us through what the issue is here, why it matters, and what an improvement would look like.
If you just focus on what you don't like about something, how useless or dumb it is, that puts a nasty torque on conversation which is hard to get out of.
I was a passenger in a car en route to a funeral. I felt like the post was a little troublesome and I provided what context I could in the limited time I had to reply.
I do wish I had said "deeply misleading" instead of "useless", though. Which-- deeply misleading is even worse than useless, unfortunately.
> walk us through what the issue is here, why it matters, and what an improvement would look like.
In this case, there's a state actor (China) deliberately conflating weather balloons and surveillance craft. Typical weather balloons drift freely and cannot maneuver; capable balloons that can control their altitude can maneuver far more freely than most people expect. "Narrative" may sound sinister, but we have a deliberate counterfactual being used in the furtherance of surveillance and geopolitical conflict.
In turn, we have this "Spy Balloon Simulator - With real atmospheric data" that makes it pretty much impossible to control a balloon. It may be an accidental misstep, but it's at the very least a somewhat dangerous one.
I’m sorry that the dismissal was short, but I did name the key problem.
It's too easy to underestimate the impact of putdowns in internet comments—impact on the readers, on other commenters, on the site as a whole, and (if they see it) on the author or creator. When you* post putdowns it usually feels innocuous, as if you're just adding a little extra emphasis, but to the reader it often comes across as much larger than the rest of the comment put together—especially when there isn't much other information.
* I don't mean you personally of course—I mean all of us.
EDIT: I just realized the author made an account to clarify in this thread that its a toy application.
I’m worried about things like: the size and weight of the balloon, the altitude of the balloon, and very difficult to predict future changes in wind speed and direction during the course of the balloon’s flight.
As other comments have pointed out, the lack of ability to test with different altitudes makes the tool unfit for that purpose.
That leaves an open question of what the creator is hoping people will see in this. Is it a game or toy? Is it a technical experiment? Is it art? Does the maker not care what it is to us? (but, still, I'm curious what it is to the maker)
The question is the purpose
Sometimes you just have time to make a think that has the potential to provoke further discussion and interest - which seems like what happened here.
It is possible for the balloon to change its altitude and then pick up different wind directions and velocities.
https://x.company/projects/loon/
> To identify helpful wind patterns, Loon used advanced predictive models to create interactive maps of the skies. These maps allowed the team to determine the wind speed and direction at specific altitudes, times, and locations. The team then developed smart algorithms to help determine the most effective flight paths through the varying wind layers. With the aid of these algorithms, the balloons could accurately sail the winds over thousands of kilometers to reach a desired location and remain clustered around those destinations in order to deliver consistent connectivity below.
And https://x.company/blog/posts/drifting-efficiently-through-th... gets into it more.
I've tried multiple different levels from 090 to 520, and it seems the deviation within level is extremely minimal.
i.e. maybe a difference between 70deg and 75deg, but if it's going in the general direction of east, there's not an altitude to turn around or even sidetrack.
Look at +6 hours at GPI (Glacier Park in Montana). At 34,000 its easterly at 24,000 its westerly.
A balloon can only navigate by catching different winds at different altitudes. When you can control the altitude from 60,000 feet to 120,000 feet there is a significant amount of variation in the direction of winds.
https://www.govtech.com/question-of-the-day/what-is-now-stee...
https://blog.x.company/drifting-efficiently-through-the-stra...
People were killed.
https://www.damninteresting.com/curio/ww2-japans-balloon-bom...
The key is to use high altitude balloons to catch the Jetstream and a system of timed weights for release.
> The news media cooperated with the military
Same as it ever was.
What is that faint whiff I detected? Is it web-site-as-performance-art?
to answer everyone's questions: 1. it is supposed to be a for fun sandbox, a 'toy' if you may 2. it can in no way become a credible source for any level of military intel 3. the altitude is at 100hPa 4. I really should add a disclaimer about how this is for fun purposes only 5. adding othe levels will give me even more data chunks, but it is certainly doable 6. I want to add (programmable) steering too! will do soon
at around 60 deg south there is no land at all, causing the wind and sea current to be exteremly strong, meaning the balloon can 'circumnavigate' the globe in time as little as 5 days, it is also known as the screaming sixties
Either way, I enjoyed this greatly! Thank you for building this.
but yea some people just won't stop so
As rough as my day has been, I have spent a lot of time with your app today. It’s not perfect (of course) but I have had a lot of fun with it today. As dark as today has been, that really means a lot.
You have gotten some really solid feedback today and I can’t disagree with it. But speaking as a user, this product has made my day significantly better. Thanks for putting this out into the world.
I hope your stepmom and dad all the best
If you're bored and want to run mass simulations with your data I'd love to know which country is the hardest to spy on via balloon.
If I was China and I wanted to make super advanced balloon to spy on US I would definitely make it so that it can use air currents at different altitudes to direct it where I want.
Is this a new style requirement for socially correct behavior?
https://amateur.sondehub.org/
Deploy point: 22.106° N , 110.918° E
Makes it all the way back.
Deploy time: 2022-11-17 17:00
Deploy point: 47.548° N , 121.537° W
Floats all the way around the world before passing within a few hundred feet of the start point. I was quite surprised when the second launch I tried turned up an (almost) eigenfloater of the matrix.
Comes back to exactly where it started, at first I thought the sim was broken.
thank y'all for your support
A: Well, it's not really possible - the NRO (the highly secretive US satellite agency) makes a lot of geospatial data available to scientists for use in studying everything from forest fires to fault geology to ocean ecosystem productivity and beyond.