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  • WHERE I WORK

Every day, I release balloons into the Antarctic sky

Electronic engineer Axel Bres predicts the weather from one of the world’s most isolated islands.
  1. Patricia Maia Noronha

    1. Patricia Maia Noronha is a freelance writer in Lisbon, Portugal.

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Axel Bres releases a weather balloon in the air on Kerguelen Island.

Axel Bres is an electronic engineer at Port-aux-Français, a French scientific base located in the Kerguelen sub-Antarctic archipelago, one of the most isolated places in the world. Credit: Patrick Hertzog/AFP via Getty

Every day at exactly 12 noon, universal time, my colleague and I release a weather balloon from the Port-aux-Français meteorological station. The base is located on Grande Terre, the largest of the Kerguelen islands, which are part of a French overseas territory in the deep south of the Indian Ocean. It can get very windy here, with speeds above 40 knots (around 75 kilometres per hour). On such days, we must hold the balloon tight before letting go.

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Nature 622, 662 (2023)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-03237-6

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