Iran Press/ America: Twice a day for the past half a century, a weather balloon to measure atmospheric conditions was released from a research station situated on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, US. Faced with advancing seas that are set to devour it, the outpost has now been abandoned.
On 31 March, the handful of workers who operated the National Weather Service station in Chatham were evacuated due to fears the property could fall into the Atlantic Ocean. A final weather balloon was released before they left, with a demolition crew set to raze the empty site this month, The Guardian reported.
Until recently, the weather station had a buffer of about 100ft of land to a bluff that dropped into the ocean, only for a series of fierce storms in 2020 to accelerate local erosion. At times, 6ft of land was lost in a single day, forcing the National Weather Service to order a hasty retreat.
“We’d known for a long time there was erosion but the pace of it caught everyone by surprise,” said Andy Nash, meteorologist in charge at the National Weather Service’s Boston office. “We felt we had maybe another 10 years but then we started losing a foot of a bluff a week and realized we didn’t have years, we had just a few months. We were a couple of storms from a very big problem.”
A parking lot next to the weather station has already been torn up due to the crumbling land, with the building now just 30ft from the edge of the bluff. Nash said his greatest fear was that a researcher, while looking up at a weather balloon as they released it, would inadvertently topple over the edge to their death.
“We got to the point where we ran out of a lot of space and if you were concentrating on the balloon near the edge, oh, that would not be a good situation,” Nash said. “The balloon is fairly big and full of helium but it’s not big enough to hold someone up. It would not save you.”
The weather station was established in 1970, initially releasing weather balloons to gauge temperature, humidity levels and wind speeds as well as operating a weather radar, which was later decommissioned.
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