WindBorne\u2019s balloons, in contrast, can collect and distribute data from remote regions. That makes them more adaptive, and especially useful for monitoring atmospheric rivers that bring extreme precipitation to coastal regions, said Glackin. \u201cI\u2019d like to see them in the suite of observing systems.\u201d<\/p>\n
The company deploys about 100 balloons from six launch sites globally, a fraction of the 92 launch sites operated by NOAA, but it aims to expand to launch up to 10,000 balloons globally over the next five years, Dean said.<\/p>\n
Windborne\u2019s data is less costly than radiosonde data \u201con a per observation or per station basis,\u201d Curtis Marshall, the director of the Commercial Data Program for the NWS, wrote in an email.<\/p>\n
And while its data is now free and open to the public, as the company expands, it wants to hold back some of the information it gathers for 48 hours so that it can sell it to private buyers, Dean said. That data would no longer be useful to other forecasters.<\/p>\n
Radiosondes\u2019 Old School Technology is Difficult to Replace<\/p>\n
Radiosondes collect one vertical profile\u2014a line from ground level to the point where the balloon explodes\u2014of data in the atmosphere, which is important for understanding climate change signals. WindBorne\u2019s balloons, in contrast, collect thousands of data points, at different altitudes, across a horizontal expanse. Their path is somewhat ad hoc, determined by where the wind blows them, whereas radiosondes collect data in a line rising from a location that stays the same for each launch.<\/p>\n
While WindBorne\u2019s lack of a consistent path doesn\u2019t matter for short-term weather forecasting, it could matter for understanding longer-term changes to the climate, which are currently based on decades of vertical profile data collected at the same spot, Glackin said. WindBorne\u2019s data would not be comparable with that historical record.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have a very cleaned-up climate record that allows us to talk about how the climate is changing,\u201d she said. \u201cIf all the radiosondes went away tomorrow, it would be hard to figure out what\u2019s changed, and what to attribute to technology versus what really happened in the atmosphere.\u201d<\/p>\n
There are methods for transitioning to new instrumentation, Colman, the meteorologist who used to work at NOAA, said, but the NWS would need to proactively plan for that changeover to maintain a consistent data record.<\/p>\n
The NWS isn\u2019t moving to replace radiosondes\u2014yet\u2014but it is in the \u201cearly stages\u201d of planning for a new suite of upper atmospheric observing systems that would provide data \u201csubstantially similar to the federal radiosonde network,\u201d Marshall wrote.<\/p>\n
The new observing systems would come from commercially operated balloons, drones, and aircraft, and \u201ccomplement our federal balloon network.\u201d<\/p>\n
However, Austin Tindle, a cofounder of Sorcerer, a WindBorne competitor, said that officials within NOAA are increasingly asking him \u201cwhat it could look like to be a true replacement to a radiosonde.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s been a vibe shift recently, coming up in conversation a lot,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
WindBorne\u2019s Dean declined to respond when asked if he\u2019d been having similar conversations.<\/p>\n
NOAA\u2019s partnership with WindBorne \u201ccould be completely on the up and up [meaning an add-on rather than a replacement], but folks don\u2019t have a lot of trust in the broader strategy for the NOAA weather enterprise, based on everything that\u2019s happened,\u201d said Di Liberto, citing the agency\u2019s June 25 announcement<\/a> that it was permanently ending\u2014within just five days\u2014a vital microwave satellite program<\/a> used for forecasting hurricanes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WindBorne\u2019s balloons, in contrast, can collect and distribute data from remote regions. That makes them more adaptive, and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":71277,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[28,5037,192,8477,79,2986],"class_list":{"0":"post-71276","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-climate-desk","10":"tag-environment","11":"tag-noaa","12":"tag-science","13":"tag-weather"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71276","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=71276"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71276\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/71277"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71276"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71276"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71276"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}