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Last week, the U.S. experienced a deadly storm outbreak with over 100 tornadoes and 1000 hail reports, but the National Weather Service provided outstanding warning information ahead of them. Weather balloons were a big tool in their box. This week NWS issued a public information statement announcing that is is temporarily suspending the frequency of weather balloon launches at some of Weather Forecast Offices. Experts say that it could degrade weather forecasts.

The Public Information Statement said, "Effective immediately, and until further notice, the National Weather Service (NWS) is temporarily reducing weather balloon launches to one flight per day at Aberdeen, SD, Grand Junction, CO, Green Bay, WI, Gaylord, MI, North Platte, NE, and Riverton, WY...." The reason given was "lack of Weather Forecast Office (WFO) staffing." The statement went on to say that special observations will be performed as needed. In recent weeks, offices in Maine, New York and other locations also experienced reductions.

At this point, let's take a little meteorology quiz. Do you know how weather forecasts are made? When I pose this question in public speaking forums the answers range from radars, satellites, detecting weather changes from west to east, and so on. Heck, some people may even think it is the weather app fairy, but I digress. Computer models solve complex mathematical equations that represent the physics of the atmospheric fluid. It is a massive fluid dynamics problem with thermodynamics, oceans, mountains, and many other processes mixed in. That's why meteorology tends to be such a rigorous collegiate major. It's far more than cold fronts and cloud types.

In order to initialize numerical prediction models, we must start with a picture of what the atmospheric conditions are like from the surface and throughout the troposphere. How do we get the information about temperature, moisture, and winds over that vertical extent? We can use satellite information, certain ground systems such as profilers or radio acoustic sounders, or even data from airplanes. However, a key workhorse for providing vertical profiles of the atmosphere is the weather balloon.

NWS typically launches weather balloons from 100 locations in the U.S., the Pacific Basin and Caribbean twice a day with a radiosonde attached to it. The Public Information Statement went on to say, "Radiosondes are instruments attached to weather balloons that send back a wide range of upper atmospheric data to support weather forecasts, including temperature, dew point, relative humidity, barometric pressure, wind speed, and wind direction."

Candidly, meteorologists like me beg for more launches not less. The atmosphere is a fluid and is constantly changing. The location of jet streams, low pressure systems, regions of spin (vorticity), thermal ridges, and other processes changes over time. That means, even with two launches per day, we are only sampling the atmosphere and only at 100 locations in the U.S. According to the World Meteorological Organization, there are over 1300 weather balloons launched global, and most of them are on the twice per day cadence.

To illustrate the importance of more frequent, denser data, NWS will often launch additional weather balloons during severe weather or hurricane events. Last month, scientists launched special weather balloons to study atmospheric rivers in the western U.S. Here's the bottom line. We want to resolve the initial condition of the atmosphere is accurately, frequently, and broadly as possible because that helps with the forecasts.

Yes, there are other ways to gather this information. Satellite systems provide a significant amount of information that goes into the weather models and analyses. Satellite soundings can have advantages in timeliness and coverage (particularly over oceans), but the vertical resolution of weather balloon data is better. As you see from the weather balloon data near Atlanta last night (above), there is a lot of fine detail in the vertical dimension that impacts the model forecast. There is a host of information like temperature (red line), dewpoint (green line), winds (barbs on the right), stability information (useful for storm potential), and precipitable water (helpful in assessing flood potential).

There are other systems out there for profiling the atmosphere. Wind profilers are a doppler radar type system that can measure winds. While some experimental networks still exist, NOAA ended its wind profiler feed in 2014. A Unidata press release noted, "The combination of tight economic conditions and wind profiler system obsolescence, in addition to the limited geographic scope of the NPN, led NOAA to recommend discontinuing the use of the Wind Profiler Network in a report to Congress in May 2013."

We can also use Aircraft Meteorological Data Reports. In fact, one of my research collaborators and I have proposed to use such data in our urban meteorological research since data is often scarce in urbanized environments. More recently, I read about emerging efforts to use sustainable, reusable gliders. A press release by Meteomatics stated, "This introduces a more sustainable and cost-effective option to conventional radiosondes that typically disappear with weather balloons as they drift and burst at high altitudes." It is certainly vital to keep an eye on emerging technologies, and from my perspective, the "more information the merrier." As the spring severe weather season marches on and hurricane season looms, we need the full capacity of our weather balloon network.

I am sure there will be discussions about cost of weather balloons, but I am as equally concerned about the cost of not doing them. Accurate weather information translates to safety for all of us and economic planning within the economy. According to a NOAA website, "The U.S. has sustained 403 weather and climate disasters since 1980 where overall damages/costs reached or exceeded $1 billion (including CPI adjustment to 2024). The total cost of these 403 events exceeds $2.915 trillion." The NWS budget costs each American roughly the price of one cup of coffee annually.

Potential weather "blind sides" could be involved with less information going into the models. As a NASA scientist, I served as Deputy Project Scientist for the Global Precipitation Measurement Mission. A satellite system now in orbit providing precipitation measurements around the globe. At NASA, colleagues would run Observing System Simulation Experiments to understand how new satellite designs, strategies, and data instruments could affect observational and forecast model performance. Unfortunately, we will need to reverse engineer that process to understand what happens when data is taken away.