Weather Blog: Was the mysterious balloon over SWFL in 2022 a Chinese balloon?

Alright, 641. I'm sure a lot of you were following along with that. Now viral Chinese weather balloon that U.S. official shot down over the weekend. I mean, this balloon has been a talk of the country since then. We're actually no stranger to these weather balloons in Florida.

In fact, there was one hanging around in the south west Florida just last year. Let's bring in first alert meteorologist Jason Denning. So Jason, what was that balloon for? Yeah, really interesting because there were reports that one of those Chinese balloons was over Florida last year. So a lot of you were thinking, Hey, I remember there was a balloon hovering over south west Florida. This was a picture from Fort Myers. Now this was over 60,000 feet up into the atmosphere. Here's a better view of it at night.

This is what it looked like. And you can see some of the reflection of the moonlight as we take a closer look. That's from Douglas Henderson. Again, that was from May 8th 2022. So let's compare that to that Chinese balloon that was spotted over the weekend and that was shot down off the coast of South Carolina. Obviously the two look very different. The payload is very, very different.

The shape of the two balloons are very different and NBC to confirm that the balloon that was over us last year was a weather research balloon measuring things like CO2 in the atmosphere as well as ozone. That was actually launched from Arizona from a company called World View. So the balloon that we had over us last year, May 8th 2022 was not one of those reported Chinese spy balloons. Just in case you were wondering.