National Weather Service scaling back balloon launches due to cuts — what that means for Minnesotans
One of President Trump's core campaign promises was to cut the size of the federal government — and he's done just that. But now, staffing shortages at nearly a dozen National Weather Service offices will mean fewer weather balloon launches.
Last week, eight additional National Weather Service offices joined the growing list of sites where weather balloon launches are now either temporarily reduced or grounded.
In their initial announcement, the National Weather Service said the cuts were due to a lack of staffing. This came after the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) announced layoffs impacting 10% of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) personnel, the agency overseeing the National Weather Service.
"Temperature, relative humidity, pressure. We can derive wind speed and direction from their GPS location," Rachel Humphrey, a meteorology professor at St. Cloud State, said. "And so those measurements are taken from the ground level where we launch them from, all the way up to about 35 kilometers or so — over 100,000 feet."
Humphrey said they also launch balloons on campus to supplement National Weather Service data.
Normally, these balloons are launched twice daily from more than 100 spots across the country and Carribean. Now, offices in Aberdeen, South Dakota; Grand Junction, Colorado; Green Bay, Wisconsin; Gaylord, Michigan; North Platte, Nebraska; and Riverton, Wyoming will only launch once a day. There will be intermittent launch suspensions in Albany, New York and Gray, Maine with all launches suspended in Omaha, Nebraska; Rapid City, South Dakota; and Kotzebue, Alaska.
"That kind of data is fed into weather models. It's fed into operations where people are trying to diagnose what is actually going on right now," Humphrey said.
Though the Twin Cities office was not impacted, Humphrey said fewer launches elsewhere can still impact our forecasts across the region.
"Weather models are only as good as the data that is fed into them. If they have gaps in their data because more data points are being taken off the map so to speak, that means that they don't have all the information that they could be utilizing," Humphrey said.
In a statement, a spokesperson for the National Weather Service agreed, saying "The more data we can feed into our weather models, the more accurate our forecasts, but I can't speculate on the extent of future impacts."
With fewer balloons, forecasters say upper air data from research balloons, commercial aircraft & satellites will have to pick up the slack.
