Science notes
The campaign, numeric winds, stations, trajectories, payloads, and puzzles are original fiction. Two real ideas sit underneath them: horizontal wind direction and speed change with altitude, and radiosonde packages carried by balloons collect atmospheric observations on the way up. Each reference below is a public page from the agency that operates or studies the thing it describes, and each is listed with what it actually supports in the game.
Balloon soundings and atmospheric layers
- National Weather Service: Radiosonde Observation. The operational fact sheet for the radiosonde network: what the instrument package measures, how often it is launched, and why upper-air data is collected at all. Supports the game's payload framing and its timed sample objectives. Reviewed 2026-09-03.
- UCAR Center for Science Education: Exploring the Atmosphere with Weather Balloons. An educational explanation of balloon soundings and the flight profile from release to burst and descent. Supports the ascent, drift, and recovery shape of a mission. Reviewed 2026-09-03.
- NOAA JetStream: Layers of the Atmosphere. The layer structure of the atmosphere. Supports the game's discrete layer stack, which is a coarse abstraction of that structure rather than a model of it. Reviewed 2026-09-03.
Phenomena the fictional missions borrow from
- National Weather Service: Radiation Fog. Radiation fog formation under clear, calm, cooling conditions. Supports the low-visibility launch briefs. Reviewed 2026-09-03.
- National Weather Service: Atmospheric Controllers of Local Nighttime Temperature. The controls on local nighttime temperature, including radiative cooling, wind, and cloud cover. Supports the overnight-cooling briefs. Reviewed 2026-09-03.
- National Snow and Ice Data Center: Science of Sea Ice. The physics and seasonal behaviour of sea ice. Supports the polar-station briefs. Reviewed 2026-09-03.
- NASA Eclipse Science. Research conducted during solar eclipses, including balloon-borne atmospheric measurement. Supports the eclipse-window brief. Reviewed 2026-09-03.
- U.S. EPA: Ground-level Ozone Basics. How ground-level ozone forms and behaves. Supports the air-quality sampling brief. Reviewed 2026-09-03.
- NOAA NESDIS: GOES-R Series Data Products. The GOES-R product list, which includes aerosol detection, aerosol optical depth, and aerosol particle size. Supports the smoke and dust sampling brief. Reviewed 2026-09-03.
Simulation boundary
Stratofloat compresses altitude, time, steering, wind, ascent, descent, sampling, and recovery into six discrete layers and integer turns. A balloon here moves a whole number of kilometres per turn and changes altitude by exactly one layer; real balloons do none of that. The winds are authored so that each mission has a verified solution, not measured or forecast. There is no burst altitude, no payload mass, no parachute, no airspace, and no weather model. The stations are invented. Stratofloat cannot model, plan, or guide a real launch, and nothing in it should be used to try.
Corrections
Two references were replaced on 2026-09-03 after link checking: a regional children's page on weather balloons that no longer resolves, and a NOAA layers page that had moved. Both were replaced with the current agency pages listed above rather than removed, because the claims they support are unchanged.