In contrast, wind-loaded balloons can collect and distribute data from remote areas. This makes them more adaptable and is especially useful for monitoring atmospheric rivers with extreme precipitation towards coastal areas, Grakin said. “I want to see them in the suite of observation systems.”
Dean said the company has deployed about 100 balloons at six launch sites around the world, a small part of the 92 launched sites NOAA operates, but it aims to expand to launch up to 10,000 balloons worldwide over the next five years.
Curtis Marshall, director of NWS Business Data Programs, wrote in an email that Windborne data is less expensive than “per observation or per station” “by per observation or per station.”
Dean said that although its data is now free, and as the company expands, it hopes to reject some information it collects for 48 hours so that it can sell it to private buyers. This data will no longer be useful to other forecasters.
Radiosondes’ old school technology is hard to replace
RadioSondes collects a vertical profile (line from the ground to the point where the balloon explodes), which is important for understanding climate change signals. In contrast, wind-loaded balloons collect thousands of data points with horizontal expansion. Their paths are somewhat temporary, depending on where the wind blows, while the radiator collects data from lines that keep the same position on each startup.
Although the lack of consistent roads for floods is not important for short-term weather forecasts, understanding the long-term changes in climate can be crucial, Grakin said, which is currently based on vertical data collected at the same location for decades. Winborne’s data will be comparable to that history.
“We have a very clean climate record that allows us to talk about climate change,” she said. “If all the radiators disappear tomorrow, it’s hard to figure out what’s going on and what attributes to what’s really going on in the technology and the atmosphere.”
Colman, a meteorologist who once worked at NOAA, said there are ways to transition to new instruments, but the NWS needs to proactively plan that transformation to maintain consistent data records.
Marshall wrote that the NWS has not replaced the radiator, but it is in the “early stage” of planning a new suite of atmospheric observation systems that will provide “data that is essentially similar to the federal radiation network.”
The new observation system will come from commercially operated balloons, drones and aircraft and “complement our federal balloon network.”
But, Austin Tindle, co-founder of the Wizard, said Noaa officials increasingly asked him: “What would it look like if a truly replaces the radiosonde.”
“Recently, it’s a shift in atmosphere, and there are frequent conversations,” he said.
When asked if he had a similar conversation, Winborne’s dean refused to respond.
NOAA’s partnership with Winborne “may be totally on the rise [meaning an add-on rather than a replacement]but based on what happened, there is not much trust in the broader strategy of NOAA weather business.
