Your Weather App Could Soon Develop Blind Spots

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:08)
You're listening to Bloomberg Businessweek with Carol Massar and Tim Stenovec on Bloomberg Radio.

**Tim Stenovec** (0:14)
It's going to be hot tomorrow. I last checked my weather app, it said 97 degrees here in New York.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:20)
It's crazy.

**Tim Stenovec** (0:20)
Yeah, who knows if that's actually accurate though.

**Carol Massar** (0:22)
It's our reality though of where we are. Yeah, and what's interesting is we did see a couple of headlines crossing earlier. The biggest US power grid failing for a third straight time to secure enough future supply commitments to ensure reliability in coming years amid a boom in data center demand. So we're talking about PJM, that power grid, and it's something that we've talked about a lot. They see total capacity cost tying a record of 16.4 billion.
So the power grab continues and it doesn't help that when you've got really hot temperatures, you're seeing really kind of stress in terms of air conditioning. We may not need it here in this studio because my fingers are numb right now.

**Tim Stenovec** (1:06)
I think it's a perfect temperature, unfortunately. I'm sorry.

**Carol Massar** (1:08)
I have hand warmers.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:09)
That's how cold it is.

**Carol Massar** (1:10)
But anyway, serious stuff going on.

**Tim Stenovec** (1:12)
You heard me mention that I don't know if the weather app is actually going to be accurate. Because who knows if that is actually accurate? Who knows if the data that they're getting from the government right now is actually as good as that data can be? That's what Mark Gongloff writes about. He's a Bloomberg Opinion editor and columnist. He covers climate change. He joins us now from New Jersey. Mark, I'm so glad that you wrote this story. You actually reference a piece that made the rounds in the Stenovec family chat, which was from Gizmodo last week. My brother sent it around.
And as you write about in the piece too, you take the piece a step further. This piece basically said the Doge firings and the cuts that we've seen at the National Weather Service have really affected the number of weather balloons that can go up and gather data. What did this report find and then what did you find in your column?

**Mark Gongloff** (2:02)
The report found that there's a big chunk of the United States, from the Great Plains up to the Midwest and the Pacific Northwest, where you're getting about half the number of weather balloon launches that you used to get. And why this matters is you're not getting them in the morning, and it's a big chunk of the West that's not getting weather balloons. And what these things are is they're like MRIs for the atmosphere, going from this ground all the way to the troposphere. So what you lose then is weather that develops early, that could affect your weather later, and weather that develops in the West, that could affect weather in the East, which it almost always does, weather moves from West to East. So you have this huge gap where you've only got about half the data you used to get. We haven't seen, nobody's done a study yet that says the forecasts are any worse.
There's a lot of anecdotal evidence. A lot of people are saying, the forecasts don't seem right to me. There was a big thing that happened in April in Kansas, where all of a sudden these tornadoes hit in Kansas, which Kansas is obviously prone to tornadoes, as we all know, but these seem to come out of almost nowhere, to some extent, and some people were starting to blame the lack of weather balloons on the Great Plains for that.

**Carol Massar** (3:22)
So, maybe we haven't missed too much yet, but is the possibility of a miss, Mark, now greater if we're not launching more balloons, weather balloons into the atmosphere?

**Mark Gongloff** (3:32)
Yeah, that's what meteorologists are saying. Again, not all of them, because the jury is still kind of out. But the thing with these balloons is that what you miss most often is extreme weather. And that's the thing we care about the most, unfortunately. And so things like flash floods, a bunch of sudden tornadoes, and also hurricanes, and hurricanes intensifying.
So those weather balloons aren't affecting that. But there are other issues with the National Weather Service, a lot of layoffs, a lot of places are stressed out. They don't have enough people. They're not keeping up websites, that sort of thing. So everything's just kind of like on edge right now. And so yes, we haven't necessarily, there's nothing, there's no fingerprints on any big mess yet, but the odds are going up. And then of course, you have the long term effect of people being stressed, meteorologists, you know, leaving a lot of very experienced meteorologists were fired last year and you don't get that institutional knowledge back very quickly.