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— Zach Wendling Nebraska Examiner LINCOLN — An Omaha area National Weather Service office will be redeploying weather balloons this week after the Trump administration decided to fund more staff.
U.S. Rep. Mike Flood, R-Neb., said he got confirmation Thursday from the White House that the administration will authorize two meteorologists next week for the NWS office, which will allow it to deploy weather balloons twice a day.
“ They’re all smiles,” Flood said, referring to the Valley NWS officials.
The announcement came after the Weather Service office for the Omaha area and other Great Plains offices announced that they would pause the deployment of weather balloons due to cuts from the Trump administration last month. Trump cut 1,000 jobs at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, which includes the National Weather Service.
Flood was among several in Nebraska’s federal delegation to push back against NWS DOGE cuts.
U.S. Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb., sent a letter to U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick expressing his concern about the plan to lay off personnel at NOAA following the recent wave of deadly storms across the country, after telling the Examiner that he would “press the White House” to restore the Weather Service office’s ability to deploy weather balloons.
The rest of Nebraska’s all-GOP delegation expressed concerns about grounding the weather balloons.
Flood said he wants to introduce legislation that would reclassify National Weather Service employees as public safety.
“Had that been in place, this would never have gotten to the point it is,” Flood told the Examiner.
Weather balloons are a key tool in forecasting. Midwestern meteorologists feared the data loss would have led to forecasting challenges. Flood also provided specifics on the NWS official staffing issues – the office typically has 13 meteorologists but was down to eight.
Nebraska experienced a blizzard last month, which caused Gov. Jim Pillen to declare a state of emergency for 24 counties. The damage estimates from the blizzard are estimated to be more than $64.8 million. The governor is seeking federal disaster assistance from the Trump Administration, calling the winter storm “one of the most destructive winter weather events to impact Nebraska in recent history.”
Eric Hunt, an agricultural meteorologist with the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, told Nebraska Public Media that the “worst-case scenario” involves forecasting accuracy returning to its 2000s levels because it would lead to shorter warning times for potential severe weather and less accurate longterm forecasts.
The Trump Administration’s decision also comes as Elon Musk is preparing to take a step back from the Department of Government Efficiency, leaving the agency without its biggest advocate.
The bottom line, say meteorologists contacted by the Flatwater Free Press: Next time bad weather hits, don’t count on forecasts to be as good as they have been.
“They are very critical in severe weather, and this puts a hole right in the middle of the Great Plains and Tornado Alley,” said Brian Smith, a retired National Weather Service meteorologist from Omaha who coordinated tornado and storm warnings for eastern Nebraska and southwest Iowa.
The timing – at the outset of severe weather season – couldn’t be worse, he said.
“It’s not a good thing,” Smith said.
The weather service attributed the move to a lack of staffing. The decision comes as the Trump administration appears poised to cut another 1,000 jobs nationwide at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the federal agency that houses the weather service.
Weather balloons are an oldschool technology married to hightech equipment. They loft sophisticated sensors many miles into the atmosphere and across great distances, allowing forecasters to “see” in detail what is happening in the atmosphere by measuring things such as temperature, humidity and wind speed.
Prior to the cutbacks, balloons were supposed to be released twice daily at 100 sites in the U.S., Caribbean and Pacific Basin. Due to the cutbacks and other issues such as helium shortages, at least 14% are no longer operating on a full schedule, the Associated Press reported. The balloons are among approximately 1,300 operated worldwide by various countries.
Smith and other meteorologists said they take no comfort from the weather service depicting the balloon curtailment as “temporary” or stating that the agency would launch balloons “for special operations as needed.”
President Donald Trump ordered a hiring freeze across most of the federal government when he came into office. The freeze remains in place at the weather service, according to the National Weather Association, a professional organization for meteorologists.
After the freeze, the cuts started. NOAA lost hundreds of employees – possibly more than 1,000 – in February as the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency cut jobs across the federal government, multiple media outlets reported. Those combined with the additional 1,000 expected cuts could amount to as many as one in four jobs at NOAA being eliminated, according to the Associated Press.
Confusion clouds staffing levels at the weather service and elsewhere due to court orders blocking some cuts, the federal government reversing itself on others and threats of possibly more cuts to come.
Even before the hiring freeze and cuts, the weather service struggled for years to fill vacant positions. The Omaha office is currently down about 26%, with some of those vacancies preceding Trump’s return to office, according to the agency’s website and internet archives.
Consistent, daily weather balloon data from the central U.S. has value regionally, globally and over the long term, said John Pollack, another retired weather service meteorologist in Omaha. But it is especially needed during severe weather.
Private forecasting services, including apps on smartphones and television broadcasts, depend on the technology, data and forecasting done by the National Weather Service, Pollack said. So losses within the federal forecasting agency are felt throughout the weather industry.
The weather service does have other sources of data: satellites, buoys, radar stations and monitors carried by airplanes. Those sources can’t match the precision of data that balloon sensors produce, Pollack said.
Data from balloon launches also improves forecasts for areas “downwind” of the balloon’s path.
The more heavily populated upper Midwest and Northeast will have less information to feed into their forecasts due to reduced balloon data from the central U.S., said James McCormick, a Bellevue-area meteorologist who has worked in private industry.
Most troubling in the near-term. “If they can’t do this any more, they are severely understaffed,” Pollack said.
A short-staffed weather service office is more prone to errors that can have serious consequences, they said. That’s because forecasters put in long, chaotic hours in severe weather, sometimes with little break between successive rounds.
James Davidsaver, director of emergency management for Lincoln/ Lancaster County, said he worries about understaffing at the weather service and how that could affect his ability to get good information to the public.
Nancy Gaarder, Flatwater Free Press contribued to this report.
