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.
“We’re flying more balloons every day and collecting more observations to help improve forecasts in light of some of these systems going down,” said John Dean, WindBorne’s cofounder and CEO.
Sofar Ocean, Tomorrow.io, Black Swift Technologies, and Saildrone are among other startups with innovative technologies and AI forecasting models that are increasingly supplying NOAA with critical atmospheric and oceanic data through its Mesonet Program. Such collaboration isn’t new, but former NOAA officials worry that the current administration, with its zeal for privatization, will jettison core federal observing systems and rely instead on private sector data to forecast the weather. While they lauded the companies’ innovations, they said that NOAA must maintain ownership of its “backbone” data assets like weather balloons to ensure public safety and maintain the historical climate record. New technologies, they said, should supplement NOAA’s core data collection efforts rather than replace them wholesale.
“NOAA has always had a robust relationship with the private sector exactly for the sorts of things that WindBorne does,” like innovate and supply data, said Tom Di Liberto, a meteorologist and former NOAA spokesperson who is now media director at Climate Central. Under the current administration, however, “the concern is, what is it going to replace?”
If private services take the place of, rather than supplement, the agency’s core data assets, that could prove problematic, because “less data is bad,” he said. “Are we actually saving money or just giving taxpayer dollars to a private company?”
Data as a Service
In the past NOAA bought sensors and hardware from companies with promising innovations to bring the technology in house. More recently, it’s adopted a model of “data as a service,” in which it buys data from companies that maintain their own hardware and intellectual property rights.
“While that can be fruitful for everyone, what I worry about is becoming so dependent on some of these innovative solutions,” said Rick Spinrad, who led NOAA during the Biden administration. “What happens when the founder [pivots]?”