In summer 2023 in southern England, we observed several unusual balloon launches which descended for a few minutes before resuming ascent again. This unusual vertical oscillation was repeated several times in a “roller-coaster”-like pattern. In this article, the behaviour of the balloons is discussed, and we suggest that these events occurred as a result of snow or ice accumulation on the surface of the balloon and payload. In a typical radiosonde launch, such profiles would have been discarded, so we recommend that datalogging operations be adjusted permitting retention of such ascents to avoid loss of potentially valuable sounding data.
Miller et al. (Wed,) studied this question.