A ballooning problem: Weather warnings face rising risks from budget cuts

Early in the evening of April 13, the skies over central Kansas darkened as a sudden severe storm developed, hurling baseball-sized hail across three counties and producing two tornadoes.

That type of extreme weather is common across the Great Plains, but what was unusual was that the forecast from the regional storm center had predicted clear skies. The problem, according to local emergency managers: the lack of critical data due to cuts to weather monitoring by the Trump administration.

At issue, meteorologists say, are spending reductions imposed under President Donald Trump by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency team last year that have thinned the network of weather balloons the National Weather Service launches twice daily — and which provide crucial information for severe weather warnings for communities across the country.

"The issue is the forecast," Thomas Winter, emergency manager for Franklin County, Kansas, said of the twister that hit his community southwest of Kansas City. "There was a zero percent chance of thunderstorms — and that forecast comes from the storm prediction center out of Oklahoma."

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data show the standard early morning launches of weather balloons — which are coordinated globally to measure wind, temperature, humidity and pressure — are no longer happening regularly. Meteorologists say the dearth of weather balloons flying over the Great Plains, Southwest, interior Northwest and Midwest have compromised severe weather forecasts, putting communities at risk of being unprepared for sudden floods, thunderstorms and tornadoes.

Meteorologists say because of Trump's cuts to the federal workforce, the National Weather Service offices in the West are too sparsely staffed on the midnight shift, which usually handles morning weather balloon releases. Those offices have instead pushed those launches to later shifts, creating sizable data holes for crafting severe weather forecasts.

The staff shortages are in part a legacy of the DOGE's efforts to thin the federal workforce, said Alan Gerard, who was a director at the Norman, Oklahoma-based NOAA National Severe Storms Laboratory until his retirement last year.

Gerard said the Oklahoma office relies heavily on those morning balloons and missing those readings has an outsized impact on high-resolution models that predict severe events in confined areas. Ultimately, that leads to less coherent atmospheric analysis — and more severe weather misses.

"This is something that we haven't ever really experienced before," Gerard said. "It's a unique situation."

NOAA rejected the notion it has curtailed or compromised its weather balloon operations. The agency has found no evidence of degradation in forecasts, which it regularly evaluates, spokesperson Erica Grow Cei said in a statement.

The Storm Prediction Center noted extreme weather possibilities as early as April 10, Cei said, and issued several analyses on April 13 indicating the growing likelihood of severe storms — which ultimately spawned more than a dozen tornadoes across several states. The Kansas tornado carried weak winds and residents said in post-event surveys that they had sufficient warning, she added.

The NWS listed the storm as causing EF-2 damage, which would put the wind gusts at up to 135 mph. A separate cyclone in nearby Osage County clocked in as an EF-0 with wind speeds topping out at 85 mph.

"Tornadoes this weak and short-lived are notoriously difficult to predict, and a lead time in excess of 20 minutes surpasses NOAA's target performance for tornado warning lead time," Cei said in a statement.

But the information gaps are becoming increasingly visible. NOAA data captured daily routinely display a dearth of weather balloon data over large chunks of the western U.S., which is consequential for the whole nation given weather patterns travel from west to east.

Steve Bowen, a meteorologist and the chief science officer at reinsurance firm Gallagher Re, also pointed to NWS staff shortages as responsible for suspended or reduced launches.

"That lack of at least twice-daily weather balloon data can add uncertainty around forecast accuracy," he said in an email. "As we head into peak hurricane, wildfire, heat, and severe storm season, we want to see less uncertainty and more confidence in weather forecasting. The better quality of data going into our weather models, the greater our confidence in the forecasts and the earlier we can warn people and businesses to take action to protect lives and property."

Lawmakers from both parties have been raising concerns about reduced weather balloon activity and NWS' capacity for at least a year.

NOAA Administrator Neil Jacobs pledged to fill critical NWS vacancies created by DOGE's cuts to NOAA, recognizing it as a public safety necessity after the agency drew criticism over its response to July 2025 flash flooding in Texas that killed more than 100 people, including 28 at a children's summer camp.

As of July 2, listings on USAJobs.gov showed NWS is trying to fill 125 meteorologist vacancies, including at the Norman-based Storm Prediction Center.

Recent experiences and data show NWS is still not back up to full speed. NOAA data ahead of the April 13 tornado indicated no balloon launches upstream of eastern Kansas — with no available morning readings from seven sites that would have previously come from balloon launches.

Gerard said the morning readings would have normally fed into a storm prediction model hours earlier. But NWS instead issued its first tornado watch for the eastern Kansas twister at 6:35 p.m. CT. NWS issued its tornado warning three minutes later.

"That definitely is unusual to go from 'no risk area defined' to 'you have strong tornadoes,'" Gerard said.

Winter, the emergency manager, said NWS' emergency alerts were not the problem. Tornado sirens were sounded 9 minutes before the twister swept through Ottawa, Kansas, at 7:30 p.m.

But he still cannot figure out how the Storm Prediction Center so badly missed the possibility of severe weather.

"What made April 13 different was not the watches or warnings — it was the forecast leading up to the event," he said.

Businesses and homes endured "substantial" damage during the "fast-moving storm," said Thatcher Moddie, Ottawa's city manager. While public infrastructure mostly escaped unscathed, private homes and businesses suffered damage. Community members are still recovering, he said.

With nearly half the nation's early morning weather balloons missing, forecasts are less accurate, Matthew Cappucci, a meteorologist at MyRadar, wrote Saturday on the social platform X. He said that was "especially concerning" for severe weather forecasts.

"This is an ongoing crisis that is degrading critical severe weather forecasts that we all rely on," he wrote. "It's having real, tangible impacts on degrading forecast quality."