Weather Balloon Launching Plan Goes Pop: Inability To Find Staff Ends Latest Effort

CHATHAM – Plans to re-establish a weather balloon launching station in town have fallen through.

 The airport commission was working with a Denver-based company that contracts with the National Weather Service to launch balloons to collect upper-atmosphere weather data. A pilot program was supposed to begin this summer — both the commission and select board had support entering into a license agreement for the service — but it was cancelled when no staff could be found to operate it.

 Neither the company, Urban Sky, Inc., nor airport commission chair Huntley Harrison could secure staffing for the program, which was to operate from a section of airport property which was previously used as a storage area for commercial fishermen. Harrison said he reached out to a person who previously worked at the National Weather Service balloon launching station on Morris Island, but that person withdrew from consideration.

 “It was a nice idea, but it just didn’t work out,” Harrison said. One person he got in touch with did not agree with the way Urban Sky planned to operate the program, which was more streamlined than the previous balloon launching program. 

“It wasn’t as simple as inflating a balloon and letting it go,” he said. Urban Sky’s program was designed to evaluate if privately operated weather balloon launching sites could supplement the existing federally-operated network.

 The National Weather Service operated the weather balloon launching station on the Morris Island property of the Monomoy National Wildlife Refuge for years until April 2021, when encroaching erosion forced the closure and demolition of the buildings used in the program. It was one of more than 90 upper air stations used to launch weather balloons twice daily to collect a variety of data up to 115,000 feet into the atmosphere. The data is then used to develop weather forecasts. Because of Chatham’s location, the weather station provided important information, the loss of which created a gap in the federal agency’s data gathering.

 Although it appears the Urban Sky deal is dead, Harrison isn’t ready to give up.

 “I’m just going to keep pursuing it,” he said. He plans to get in touch with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which operates the National Weather Service, in the fall to determine if there’s another avenue to restarting the program.