On March 20, 2025, the National Weather Service (NWS) announced that it will be stopping or reducing weather balloon operations at 11 locations due to staffing shortages. The announcement came after the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced hundreds of layoffs and voluntary resignations across the agency, including at NWS.
The weather balloons gather temperature, wind, pressure, and other data, which Michael Morgan, the former assistant secretary of commerce for environmental observation & prediction at NOAA, described as “one of the fundamental inputs to climate and weather forecasting models.”
In the announcement, the agency called the weather balloons “just one of many technologies that collect earth observation data for weather modeling and forecasting” including commercial aircrafts and satellites. But according to Morgan, NWS is “going to lose data, …[a]nd that loss of data then translates into less precise forecasts, more uncertainties in the forecast.”