The Fifth Elephant Winter Edition 2026

Submission type: Showcase

A few weeks ago, I got hold of a little USB radio receiver. When you plug this into your laptop, it can hear all sorts of things, like shortwave, FM, chatter of air traffic control and flights passing overhead, pictures sent down from Russian weather satellites and so on. While that sounds cool, in these circles it is fairly unremarkable. But most mornings, somewhere around five, another signal clicks on across the country. If you listen to that, and it can be a little tricky to, you’ll find yourself following a small radio tied to a balloon as it climbs into the early morning sky, making notes about the atmosphere as it goes.

The India Meteorological Department sends these balloons up from dozens of stations and has done so in some form for over a century. What started as kites flown in Karachi and “sondes” built by hand in Pune have now become a network of GPS-tracked devices that work diligently as we sleep. There is a strong chance that you probably didn’t know they existed. I have really taken to following them. Over these weeks, that has meant hardware and software, scraping data and poring over archives, learning with LLMs, and sometimes getting up at four in the morning with a pair of binoculars to see if I can spot one again.

This talk is about falling for a relatively obscure piece of public infrastructure and about how Diagram Chasing, our open-source data journalism publication, tries to turn this individual fascination into a story, and something others care about too. How do we dig through archives, find the data and interesting ways to look at it, and turn thousands of balloon flights into a story? By the end of this talk, I promise you’ll care about balloons too.

Takeaways

1. How something small and “boring” can carry an interesting story.
2. A walkthrough of the work behind this story, which involves scraping launch records, archival research and radio signals into an open dataset and a visual story, including what we got wrong and how LLMs helped and didn’t along the way.

Audience
General audience. But maybe also people working with open government data, and anyone curious about data storytelling, weather or public infrastructure. It should also suit hobbyists who want to see how a personal obsession can be translated into a story. No technical background is needed to follow along.

Bio

I am a data, design and code person. I co-run Diagram Chasing, where I do a little bit of everything that goes into making visual tools and stories with data. I aim to make Indian public data cool as heck. Website.

Topic/Domain: Data journalism, Open data, Open source, Government data, Public infrastructure, Weather and climate, Meteorology, Atmospheric science, Radio and SDR, Data viz