NOAA Cuts Weather Balloon Launches Due to Staff Shortages After DOGE Layoffs

The president-elect of the American Meteorological Society compares the situation to bolts in a steel office building, warning: “Nobody can say how many bolts you can leave out or remove before the structural integrity is compromised.”

The National Weather Service is reducing the number of weather balloons it launches across the country, an early tangible decrease in services offered in the wake of cuts by the Trump administration. 

The NWS, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, announced last week that it was halting or reducing weather balloon operations at 11 locations, citing staffing shortages. 

The NWS uses these weather balloons, until recently launched twice per day from 100 total locations, to gather temperature, wind, pressure and other data from the ground up to approximately 100,000 feet. The results are compiled along with data from satellites, radar stations, surface weather stations, buoys and aircraft to build weather models and forecasts that are public and freely available.

Any weather forecast made available via broadcast news, a commercial app or other media is almost certainly derived from data and model computations made by the National Weather Service using weather balloons. 

Michael Morgan, former assistant secretary of commerce for environmental observation and prediction at NOAA and now a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said data from weather balloons is one of the fundamental inputs to climate and weather forecasting models. 

“We’re going to lose data because of this staffing,” Morgan said in a press conference Monday.  “And that loss of data then translates into less precise forecasts, more uncertainties in the forecast. 

“Does it mean every single forecast is going to be poor? No, but it does mean that the uncertainties in our forecast will grow over time.”

Alan Sealls, longtime television meteorologist and president-elect of the American Meteorological Society, said that time will tell how much the loss of several balloon launch sites will impact the accuracy of those forecast models. 

“It’s similar to constructing a steel-framed office building requiring a certain number of bolts,” Sealls said in an email. “Nobody can say how many bolts you can leave out or remove before the structural integrity is compromised.”

The National Weather Service did not respond to requests for comment on the balloon launches and how it would impact forecasting. 

The agency’s announcement of the cutbacks said that radiosondes, the equipment on weather balloons, “are one of many technologies that collect earth observation data for weather modeling and forecasting. Data is also collected from instruments aboard commercial aircraft, surface observing stations, satellites, radars, and buoys.”

NOAA also said that the impacted offices would still perform “special observations as needed.” 

DOGE Cuts Hamper Models

The balloon launches were cut after NOAA announced hundreds of layoffs or voluntary resignations across the agency, including at the National Weather Service, as the agency fell into the crosshairs of President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, headed by Elon Musk.

The cuts were announced in waves since staffing reductions took effect. Former NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad said in a press conference last week that about 650 NOAA employees were reportedly among those fired, and his former colleagues in the agency said that they had been ordered to “identify another 1,029 positions” for termination.  

The NOAA firings have been challenged in court, and on March 13 a U.S. District Court in Maryland issued a temporary restraining order instructing that impacted workers be reinstated. Those workers have since been put on administrative leave and have not returned to work, according to court filings.

Morgan said that because the orders targeted probationary workers—people who had been in their current role for less than two years—NOAA was losing many of its most promising young employees. 

“Some of these probationary employees were actually new, early-career folks that have been bringing in a skill set that, frankly, I don’t have, and a lot of folks who have been at the Weather Service for a while don’t have,” Morgan said. “These are folks that know about Python, know about machine learning and data science, that were going to help move the Weather Service into this next generation of modeling and model development.”

NOAA said it has suspended all radiosonde launches until further notice at three stations: Kotzebue, Alaska; Omaha, Nebraska; and Rapid City, South Dakota.

NOAA also announced it was reducing launches to once per day at an additional six locations: Aberdeen, South Dakota; Grand Junction, Colorado; Green Bay, Wisconsin; Gaylord, Michigan; North Platte, Nebraska; and Riverton, Wyoming.

Launches from two other stations—Albany, New York, and Gray, Maine—have been temporarily suspended, but NOAA said the launches would resume twice per day “when staffing permits.”

In addition to impacts for immediate forecasting, Sealls said the loss of data history could create gaps for future researchers and model developers. 

Despite the reductions, NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center issued its spring weather outlook last week, which included critical drought warnings for the Colorado River, the Rio Grande and large portions of the southwestern United States. 

How It Works

The balloons are filled with helium to be roughly five feet in diameter and released at the same time from all participating weather stations, in what the Weather Service calls its Upper Air Observation network. 

Once launched, each balloon carries a radiosonde, a device that collects data on temperature, dew point, relative humidity, barometric pressure, wind speed and wind direction.

The radiosonde transmits that data in one-second intervals as it rises through the atmosphere. A typical balloon flight lasts around two hours, and can reach altitudes over 100,000 feet and can drift more than 100 miles from the launch site, according to the Weather Service.  

The balloon eventually bursts, and the radiosonde falls back to the ground with a parachute. 

The NWS website says that despite the variety of other methods of collecting data, “the weather balloon remains the best platform for observing temperature, wind, relative humidity, and pressure above the ground.”

James Spann, a prominent television meteorologist in central Alabama, said those balloon flights are a crucial part of delivering local forecasts. 

“That’s the input for the computer models,” Spann said. “And if you don’t have data at the input of these models, you get no output. So the upper air observation network is critical.”

According to the posted notices, NWS offices “will perform special observations as needed.” 

Sealls said those special observations will be critical in severe weather events. 

“Missing weather balloon data will become a big concern in threats of hurricanes, winter storms, ice storms, tornadoes and other severe weather because weather balloons offer detail above the ground that other instruments cannot match,” he said.

Cover photo:  A meteorologist prepares to release a weather balloon at National Weather Service Headquarters in Sterling, Va. Credit: Benjamin C. Tankersley/The Washington Post via Getty Images