The National Weather Service (NWS) is cutting some of its weather balloon launches, and Cowboy State Daily meteorologist Don Day isn’t happy about it.
In response to layoffs at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the NWS announcedthis week it’s indefinitely suspending twice-daily weather balloon launches at several locations because of alack of staffing. One of those locations is the NWS Office in Rapid City, South Dakota, which provides weather forecasts for northeast Wyoming.
Additionally, the NWS announced that the number of weather balloon launches at several offices, including those in Riverton and Grand Junction, Colorado, would temporarily be reduced to one per day.
Day said he’s “very concerned” about these developments at the NWS because fewer balloon launches mean less information on current and future weather systems that will impact Wyoming and the Western states.
“These weather balloon launches are a critical facet meteorologists use every day to make forecasts and try to understand what's going on with the atmosphere,” he said. “With balloons not launching in as many locations, there will be a detriment. It's going to have an impact.”
Air Advantage
The NWS has launched weather balloons from strategically placed locations across the United States twice a day for decades. Day said the balloons reveal what’s happening in the air from the air.
“It’s part of a global process,” he said. “Around 6 a.m. and 6 p.m., these balloons go up in locations around the world. They carry an instrument package measuring temperature, pressure, wind, and humidity from the surface to the stratosphere.
“This gives us a vertical profile of what the atmosphere is doing with real measurements.”
Weather balloons have been launched twice daily from the NWS offices in Riverton, Rapid City, Denver, Grand Junction, Salt Lake City and Billings, Montana, for decades. The locations were strategically chosen based on their respective distances from each other, offering a broad assessment of what’s happening with incoming weather.
These six locations are part of a global network of 400 spots, all launching their weather balloons twice a day at the same times. It’s what keeps weather forecasts current, accurate and timely, Day said.
“The absolute starting point for weather forecasts is the balloon data,” Day said. “There is nothing more important than the balloon data.”
Fewer Launches, Less Knowledge
Day was so concerned about the NWS that he immediately contacted Wyoming’s congressional delegation to inform them of how critical these balloon launches are.
“I sent them a note this morning saying this is really unacceptable,” he said Friday. “It’s dumb to cut something this important. Let’s not make this harder than it needs to be.”
Day said his passionate defense of the NWS weather balloon launches is purely professional, not political. He’s also not critical of the NWS, which he said was already working with skeleton crews before the latest cutbacks were announced.
“I’m a big fan of the NWS and what they do,” he said. “The problem is they’re understaffed, and they’ve been understaffed in this part of the world for a while.
“I think this is a situation where they’re trying to save money by making these cuts, but are we doing potentially harmful things? That's where I come to. To me, this is a really shortsighted way of doing things to save money.”
Properly launching a weather balloon requires training. The NWS has ensured that trained personnel are always ready to launch the balloons at globally coordinated times to gather critical weather data.
With cutbacks, gaps will occur in atmospheric analyses that the NWS and other meteorologists use to deliver accurate weather forecasts, Day said, adding that gaps are bad and have consequences.
“This is like not changing the oil in an engine,” he said. “If you don't have any atmospheric data in large gaps of space between the balloons, the models will suffer. When you're not putting anything in certain locations, as they say: garbage in, garbage out.”
Hitting When It Hurts
Day said he’ll still be able to prepare Wyoming weather forecasts without twice-daily launches from Riverton and Rapid City. However, he believes reducing or eliminating these launches is unnecessary and will create significant problems.
“I don't want to get the impression that all of a sudden all the forecasts are going to go bad,” he said. “But it's an unnecessary handicapping of an already difficult job. It's already not easy to do what meteorologists do, so why are we handicapping ourselves by reducing the amount of data that we're able to get?”
With this ongoing lack of atmospheric analysis, Day said future weather forecasts “won’t be as accurate as they could be.”
That might not sound like such a big deal to average Wyomingites, but Day worries that it’ll hit where it hurts.
“This just isn’t responsible,” he said. “This is spring storm season. This is calving and lambing season. In my opinion, these twice-daily balloon launches are not negotiable. This is something you make sure you do. It’s too important of a function.”
Andrew Rossi can be reached at arossi@cowboystatedaily.com.
