Budget cuts at the U.S. National Weather Service are beginning to show effects in weather forecast preparations, a panel of experts said during a session yesterday at the NBAA Schedulers & Dispatchers Conference.

The agency released a bulletin this week noting that, due to a “lack of Weather Forecast Office staffing,” it would be immediately suspending weather balloon launches at its offices in Omaha, Nebraska, and in Rapid City, South Dakota. This followed earlier announcements that balloon launches in several other locations would also be suspended or curtailed due to staffing issues.

“The impacts are starting because I have seen reports that a few offices in the Plains have stopped doing balloon launches because they are understaffed or underfunded,” said Andy Eggert, a flight planner/meteorologist at International Trip Planning Services. “It’s basically a trickle-down effect: if we lose that at the local level, that’s less data fed into the models, [and] that’s less data to be run into research studies.”

He equated the situation to a slow leak in a tire. “It’s not an immediate problem, but it causes a bigger problem down the way. We’ll just have a degradation of available data.”

Rich Weiss, quality assurance and training manager at World Fuel Services, added, “The weather balloons that get launched daily, it’s not just for that day’s model run, now it’s in the historical data for any future model run where you see a similar situation happening.”

In addition, Weiss noted that there has also been a reduction in the number of operational hurricane-hunting aircraft. “I believe there is one that will be permanently grounded, which is not good for hurricane forecasting.”

He described how, during Hurricane Katrina in 2005, it took multiple hurricane aircraft flights into the storm to collect enough data to correct an error in the modeling of the path of the storm, which was initially forecast to make landfall in Panama City, Florida, rather than its eventual target of New Orleans.

“All these models and data have improved year over year,” concluded Eggert. “Basically, if we cut data sources, we’re cutting off that improvement. We’re not going to get any better, and we’ll probably do worse.”

To collect upper atmosphere data to support weather forecasts, the agency launches weather balloons twice daily from 100 sites in the U.S., Caribbean, and Pacific Basin. This data contributes to a U.S. forecasting system that is widely considered to be the gold standard.