(intentionally degraded image quality) With all of the controversy regarding the lack of National Weather Service launches, I wanted to let readers know that I have a photo of the building used as part of their weather balloon launches in my collection at Adobe Stock Photography .  Example photos from my collection of hundreds... And, with the wheat harvest coming up...

The answer is NO! The story is a bit of a mess and won't try to explain all of it. Here are the bottom lines: Yes, the tornado forecasts,  including the watch, on the 13th (Monday's tornadoes in Ottawa and in Miami County) were objectively poor. But few meteorologists who are familiar with tornado forecasting believe the weather balloon issue was the determining factor .  As to people, the 5-person team that issues tornado watches has been staffed with five well-qualified meteorologists the entire time. No cuts.  With regard to the tornado warning for Belton on the 17th, it was out six minutes before the tornado even formed. While a little more lead-time would have been nice, 6 minutes is adequate to dash to the basement.  The above said, the senior leadership of the NWS and NOAA need to resolve the weather balloon issue as soon as possible and the resolution should be based on meteorological science rather than convenience. 

We have good news: next week, the National Weather Service's (NWS) office in Omaha will resume launching weather balloons twice per day. But, the attempt to overplay the current -- significant -- issues continues.  The headline , from yesterday, is simply wrong. There is no severe weather forecasting done at the University of Wisconsin -- Madison.  Lots of useful research, including the corrections between satellite data and extreme weather, is done but not forecasting.  The article talks about their satellite archive -- which is important -- but NOAA keeps a similar archive.  My point is that there is plenty to worry about at this time but inflating the problems does no one any good. 

In another round of what I believe is "malicious compliance," the National Weather Service (NWS) is going to further cut back the vital weather balloon network. And, I'm told, more balloon cuts are on the way.  The NWS was -- unnecessarily -- cutting the network before President Trump was sworn in (circles). Now, they cutting more of the network back to, evidently, generate more media outrage and put more pressure on the Trump Administration. I say that because, according my sources (and I have several), not all of these offices have lost people compared to 30 days ago. They are creating a pressure campaign as we are going into the meat of tornado season and hurricane season is immediately thereafter.  Denver and Chatham (MA) have stopped launching balloons completely, the latter station has closed completely. The station in Alaska is now one per day as are all of the X's, effective immediately.  A Dangerous Game!    Russia has cut its network back to once per d...

We are losing daily weather balloon launches at two more weather stations, these in the Northeast.  These are balloon stations #5 and #6 from which we have lost scheduled twice daily -- and essential -- upper air data.  If I am correct this is not absolutely necessary, the  NWS is playing a dangerous game. Some DOGE person or legislator X months from now might say, "If you have still made forecasts without this data, we can save money by permanently shutting the launches down." And, because we have not done the "data starvation" studies that we should have been doing all along, we don't have solid scientific proof to demonstrate the effects on forecasts of losing all of this data.  You don't have to be a meteorologist to launch weather balloons. There is a fine meteorology program at the University at Albany. Perhaps students could be paid a small amount of money to launch the balloons on an ongoing basis, thus saving the NWS dollars on a net basis. 

In the middle is a parachute and, at lower left, the instrument package that measures temperature, humidity and GPS location. It's location is measured to  derive wind speed and direction.  We have discussed that the NWS is so under-resourced that it cannot perform its core mission. Another domino fell today.  You might say, "Who cares, Alaska is a long way away." The problem is that the weather moves throughout the world.  Below is a current weather satellite image showing a storm moving into southeast Alaska and western Canada.  That storm is forecast to be over the middle of the nation in five days. Already, the NWS's Storm  Prediction Center is flagging the potential for significant tornadoes in the gold area for Tuesday and Tuesday night. I believe this is the 4th weather balloon station in the United States we have lost due to resource issues.  If we want to have any kind of accuracy in forecasts beyond about 2 days, we must have quality worldwi...

Dr. Richard Spinrad Just-departed NOAA administrator Dr. Richard Spinrad has posted a piece on his LinkedIn account pertaining to NOAA and the Trump Administration’s ongoing efforts to tackle America’s $37 trillion-dollar deficit. His comments are reproduced in their entirety below. To my knowledge, so far, no cuts to weather forecasting or NOAA have been proposed by Elon Musk's DOGE or President Trump nor has the "elimination" of NOAA been proposed.    Dr. Spinrad writes:  Before modern NOAA existed … an unforecasted hurricane hit Galveston in 1900 destroying the city and killing about 8,000 people.  He went on to write -- with remarkable chutzpah --  So go ahead Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump, fire those NOAA employees and cut the agency’s budget, but have the guts to stand up and take the hit for the deaths and destruction that result…”   My reply: In 2011, 41 years after NOAA was created, a wrongly-forecast EF-5 tornado struck the city of Joplin, Missouri, kil...

Observations of the upper atmosphere, as measured by instruments carried aloft by balloons, are the mother's milk of weather forecasts. Other than a few hours in advance, weather forecasts cannot be made without them.  So, this report from Australia is highly alarming . It is especially the case because weather balloons, because of the lack of land mass, are so rare in the Southern Hemisphere. We are having issues with weather balloon launches in the USA.  Increasingly, we seem to have a lack of genuine management experience in meteorology. 

The National Weather Service (NWS) launches weather balloons twice a day (more often when extreme weather is forecasted to occur) to gather information on the pressure, winds, temperature and humidity aloft. This data is absolutely vital, especially during tornado season, to the accuracy of storm forecasts and warnings. The NWS officially announced this morning that we will be losing about 10% of our rawinsondes during tornado season -- when they are needed the most -- because of contract and other issues.  The preservation and improvement of the meteorological database is the National Weather Service's Job One because, without that data, neither it nor anyone else can make accurate weather forecasts and, when it comes to tornadoes, accurate warnings.  I'm not the only meteorologist with that opinion. The NWS's own Roger Edwards of their severe storm prediction center says, A "RAOB" is meteorologists' shorthand for the data radioed back by the weather balloon...