How many weather ballons have been cut by federal cuts and what has the impact been on forecasting weather?
Executive summary
Federal staffing and budget reductions have led the National Weather Service to suspend or reduce upper-air balloon launches at at least 11 launch sites and to a decline of roughly 18–20% in the number of stations doing regular twice-daily soundings, but reporting does not provide a single, definitive count of individual balloons grounded; the operational impact is a measurable erosion of raw observations that feed forecasting models and a shift toward private data purchases and alternate observing systems to try to plug gaps [1] [2] [3] [4].
1. What was cut — the scale in plain terms
Public reporting documents that twice‑daily radiosonde launches, historically conducted from roughly a hundred U.S. upper‑air stations, have been curtailed at a nontrivial share of sites: multiple outlets report launches were halted or reduced at "at least 11 locations," with some analyses estimating about an 18–20% loss of twice‑daily coverage across the nation — a drop that translates to roughly a fifth of upper‑air stations operating at reduced frequency though not every source converts that into a specific balloon count [3] [1] [2] [5] [4].
2. Why the cuts happened — staffing and budget drivers
The reductions stem from a mix of administration budget proposals, internal personnel actions and hiring freezes that left many National Weather Service offices short‑staffed; news reports cite policy moves that proposed large percentage cuts to NOAA budgets, termination or buyouts of hundreds of employees, and explicit decisions to make twice‑daily launches optional at understaffed forecast centers [6] [7] [8] [9].
3. Immediate operational consequences for forecasts
Radiosondes carried aloft by balloons provide vertical profiles of temperature, humidity, pressure and wind that are a foundational input to numerical weather prediction; experts and reporting warn that missing these profiles degrades the initial conditions models use, increasing forecast uncertainty especially for rapidly evolving severe events and potentially changing hurricane‑landfall tracks and precipitation forecasts when gaps occur in the path of a storm [5] [10] [11].
4. How big an impact has been observed so far
Evidence of concrete forecast failures directly tied to fewer balloon launches is mixed: some local forecasts and warnings remained effective because neighboring launch sites or other observing systems provided needed data, and at least in one high‑profile flood event nearby stations were still launching as planned — but forecasters and scientists uniformly say that larger or more strategically located gaps in balloon coverage would make model guidance and lead times worse, and several outlets report forecasters running with one or zero daily launches at some offices, a practice that increases risk of degraded model performance [1] [4] [10] [2].
5. Workarounds, commercial markets and longer‑term risks
NOAA and the Weather Service are procuring high‑altitude observations from private balloon and drone firms and leaning on satellites and other sensors to compensate, but reporters and scientists caution that these substitutes are not one‑for‑one replacements for the long radiosonde archive used for both operational forecasts and climate baselines, and proposed cuts to research labs and long‑term programs could erode forecasting gains made over decades [3] [7] [5] [2].
6. What reporting does not — and why that matters
Available sources do not provide a single authoritative tally of the absolute number of individual balloon flights cancelled or the precise daily reduction in launches nationwide; the best public figures are percentages and counts of affected stations (e.g., ~18–20% of upper‑air stations and "at least 11" locations with suspended launches), so any numeric summary must caveat that the reporting describes scope in stations and percent reductions rather than an exact flight‑by‑flight count [1] [2] [3].
7. Bottom line — risk, not immediate collapse
The cuts have removed a meaningful slice of routine upper‑air observations and raise a credible risk of degraded forecasts — especially for localized severe weather and storm track prediction — while NOAA pursues short‑term workarounds; the practical impact to date has been uneven (some forecasts held up, some offices operating with fewer launches), but scientists warn that sustained and broader losses of radiosonde coverage would make reliable, high‑lead‑time forecasting materially harder [10] [5] [3] [4].