Private Companies Are Now Gathering Weather Data for NOAA

Windborne balloons, on the other hand, can collect and distribute data from remote regions. This makes them more adaptive, and particularly useful for monitoring atmospheric rivers that bring extreme precipitation to coastal regions, said Glackin. “I would like to see them in the continuation of observation systems.”

The company deploys around 100 balloons from six launch sites worldwide, a fraction of the 92 launch sites operated by the NOAA, but it aims to develop to launch up to 10,000 balloons worldwide over the next five years, said Dean.

Windborne data is less expensive than radiosonde data “by observation or station,” wrote Curtis Marshall, director of the commercial data program for NWS, in an email.

And although its data is now free and open to the public, as the company is developing, it wants to retain some of the information it brings together for 48 hours so that it can sell it to private buyers, said Dean. These data would no longer be useful to other forecasters.

Old Radiosonds school technology is difficult to replace

The radiosonds collect a vertical profile – a ground level line to the point where the ball explodes – of data in the atmosphere, which is important for understanding the signals of climate change. Windborne balloons, on the other hand, collect thousands of data points, at different altitudes, through a horizontal extent. Their path is somewhat ad hoc, determined by the place where the wind blows them, while the radiosonds collect data in a line rising from a location which remains the same for each launch.

Although the lack of coherent Windborne course does not matter for short -term weather forecasts, it could be important to understand the longer -term changes in the climate, which are currently based on decades of vertical profile data collected in the same place, said Glackin. Windborne data would not be comparable to this historic folder.

“We have a very cleaned climate file that allows us to talk about how the climate is changing,” she said. “If all the radiosonds disappeared tomorrow, it would be difficult to understand what has changed and what to attribute to technology compared to what really happened in the atmosphere.”

There are transitional methods to new instruments, Colman, the meteorologist who worked at the NOAA, said, but the NWS should proactively plan this change to maintain a coherent data recording.

The NWS does not move to replace the radiosonds – but – but it is at the “first stages” of planning a new suite of observation systems of the high atmosphere which would provide data “significantly similar to the federal radiosonde network”, wrote Marshall.

The new observation systems would come from balloons, drones and aircraft operated on commercially, and “would complete our network of federal balloons”.

However, Austin Tindle, co -founder of Sorcerer, a competitor of the wind, said that the NOAA officials asked him more and more “what it could look like a real replacement of a radiosonde”.

“It was a change of atmosphere recently, coming a lot in the conversation,” he said.

The dean of Windborne refused to answer when he was asked if he had had similar conversations.

The Noaa partnership with Windborne “could be completely up [meaning an add-on rather than a replacement]But people do not have much confidence in the wider strategy for the Noaa weather company, on the basis of everything that happened, “said Di Liberto, citing the agency’s announcement on June 25 that it ended permanently – without five days – a vital microwave satellite program used for the Hurricanes forecast.