I've played with commercial sensors building homemade radiosondes. The posted board looks similar to most payloads I've designed. Most parts appear to be pretty run of the mill - but put together very nicely. I'm no EE, but I'd love to see a list of what sensors they actually used because at this point I've played with a decent number of them.
For pressure, I'd be decently willing to trust their data. Most barometers I've used are pretty good across a range of temperatures, pressures and can deal with pretty quick changes in pressure. I'm partial to the HP206C sensor, which has performed quite well in my launches and in tests in a vacuum jar. Others are perfectly acceptable too. So that data, at least, is likely usable.
GPS is actually pretty good at position and they have 1Hz updates. I've used the exact sensor they used. It performs quite well in my experience. Getting the data to 3d space is pretty easy and they can do some crude motion analysis based on it. You can wave your hands at the updraft speed and rotation at least. Is it scientific? No, not really, but it definitely is interesting. As is a 3d plot of GPS locations as a KMZ, which I think is the most useful thing they can do. Both are easy and frankly they should have that done by now.
My experience with small temperature sensor is much less encouraging. Most do not perform well on balloon launches, which are less demanding than this application. The LMS6, the NWS radiosonde, has temperature probes that have been calibrated for flight. They launch calibration balloons with 5 different temp sensors that have been painted with known absorptivity values and calibrate against that. In my experience, the kind of temperate sensors this probe seems to use are pretty poor performing, with a substantially warm bias. I had particularly poor experience with the MCP9808 on a launch this year, with it reading ~ 10ºC warm consistently, compared against the NWS sounding at the same time. Bead thermistors are more common in commercial radiosondes than chip based ones. I am very skeptical of any temp data they show.
In general, the thermometers are similar performing to moisture sensors: most are going to be RH and people use the Arden Buck equations to try and derive a dew point. I've launched thin film polymer capacitors as my normal sensor and they're acceptable, but without good temperature measurements anything is going to be kinda useless.
They might be able to show some interesting correlations between pressure and updraft speed, along with the path lofted debris take (though the CC of the debris fallout yesterday does a nice job of that too). Nothing here to justify what he's doing, but that's his choice.
It's far less interesting than the successful launch of the Torus balloon into the updraft a couple days ago...or a lot of the data they're getting.
