Popping balloons
On weather balloons, budget cuts, and the consequences of shutting down data collection
The National Weather Service has been placed under drastic personnel cuts by the Executive Branch, and the elimination of more than a thousand jobs is showing up in service reductions.
â– The Omaha office has suspended weather balloon flights due to the cuts. That may not seem significant at first, but small gaps in knowledge can have amplified consequences.
â– Omaha is the only close balloon site typically found upwind of most of Iowa, which means that the information captured by those radiosonde observations will no longer be available for forecasting purposes over the state.
â– That means no proximate upper-air data on pressure, temperature, winds, and humidity -- all of which can tell meteorologists a lot about the potential for conditions ranging from the ordinary to the severe. It's a significant loss of useful information.
