First is the Bureau of Meteorology’s weather balloon targets – these are released from between 1-16 times a day from 44 BoM offices around Australia. They consist of a polystyrene target with a silver lining, huge balloon and a rope and torch at night and there is no attempt to retrieve them once they have burst and landed, much of the time, in the ocean.
Earlier this year we released a report to all federal and state environment ministers as well as to the director’s of BoM and the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, who were very surprised to hear about this daily pollution into the Great Barrier Reef. There is currently an investigation going on about this pollution, and we are pleased to announce that last week one of the BoM offices stopped using these weather balloons and upgraded to a ‘profiler’ which is an electronic device that doesn’t pollute. We are pushing for these profilers to be installed into all 43 remaining BoM offices to stop the need for weather balloons to be released into the environment.
Photo: David Kelly / The Courier Mail
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