This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
When staffing shortages caused the National Weather Service (NWS) to suspend weather balloon launches at its Kotzebue, Alaska, station earlier this year, a startup deploying next-generation weather balloons, WindBorne Systems, stepped up to fill the void.
The company began selling its western Alaskan atmospheric data to the NWS in February, plugging what could have been a critical data gap in weather forecasting.
Weather balloons collect real-time atmospheric temperature, humidity, wind speed, and pressure data that meteorologists use to predict the weather and understand longer-term changes to the climate. The Alaska office was one of about a dozen to suspend or scale back balloon launches in response to deep staffing cuts instituted by the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Critics claim that the cuts have weakened the NWS’s forecasting capacity as hurricane season bears down and extreme weather events, like the floods that ripped through Texas, claim lives and destroy property.
As the beleaguered weather service struggles to maintain its forecasting and other services, it’s leaning on private companies to pick up the slack. For example, WindBorne, which is backed by Khosla Ventures, a venture capital firm focused on investing in companies with innovative business models and technologies, is opening five new balloon launch sites in the US this year as it expands its work with the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the parent agency of the NWS.
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