Dr. Michael Connolly: “20 million weather balloons – How the data debunks the climate models”

On May 13, 2025, CERES co-team leaders, Dr. Willie Soon and Dr. Michael Connolly, both gave presentations at the Heritage Foundation’s one day symposium on “Is the Sky Falling? Reconsidering the Endangerment Finding” (https://www.heritage.org/climate/event/the-sky-falling-reconsidering-the-endangerment-finding).

This is Dr. Connolly’s talk entitled, “20 million weather balloons: How this data shows that all the climate models are based on wrong assumptions”. In this talk, he summarized the findings from more than a decade of detailed analysis of the weather balloon data.

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Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
00:50 The basic assumptions of climate models and what relevant information can the weather balloons provide?
03:59 Defining the troposphere, tropopause and stratosphere
05:20 Using molar density to analyse weather balloons
07:26 Case study: 1 year of weather balloon data from 1 location (Tucson, AZ)
10:18 The Hadley, Ferrel & polar cells: revisiting 18th century science using 21st century data
11:19 How to calculate “mass fluxes” in the atmosphere from weather balloons using molar density
11:59 The theoretical mass fluxes predicted by the Hadley cell theory
13:09 The actual mass fluxes, as measured by weather balloons
15:28 Final summary and conclusions

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Relevant Links:

⭐ Published peer-reviewed papers:
❶ M. Connolly, R. Connolly, W. Soon, V. M. Velasco Herrera, R. G. Cionco and N. E. Quaranta (2021). “Analyzing atmospheric circulation patterns using mass fluxes calculated from weather balloon measurements: North Atlantic region as a case study”. Atmosphere 12(11), 1439; https://doi.org/10.3390/atmos12111439
❷ Michael Connolly, Orla Dingley, Ronan Connolly, Willie Soon (2024). “Comparing different tropopause estimates from high-resolution ozonesondes”. Earth and Space Science. 11 (5), e2024EA003584. https://doi.org/10.1029/2024EA003584
🔹 For Michael & Ronan’s earlier working papers on this topic (2014), see https://oprj.net/

⭐ Good sources for weather balloon data if you want to do your own analysis:
❶ University of Wyoming’s “Atmospheric Soundings” website. Great for exploratory research. Easy to download a few balloons and look at in Excel. http://weather.uwyo.edu/upperair/sounding.html
❷ NOAA’s Integrated Global Radiosonde Archive (IGRA). Better for more systematic research. All balloons back to the early 20th century. Suitable for analysing with computer scripts. 20 Gigabytes (20 Gb) https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data-access/weather-balloon/integrated-global-radiosonde-archive
❸ Another case study of molar density plots: 1 year of balloon data from Valentia Observatory (Ireland, 2012): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNvjqyvM0gM