 Good afternoon. It's the National Weather Service calling for approval to launch the balloon granting the approval to launch Went from waiting to balloon release I'm public information officer Laurie Fowler in San Diego twice a day A large white balloon is released into the sky high above the region. It's gathering important intel but not the kind You might immediately think The data retrieved by the National Weather Service's weather balloon is transmitted across the state to assist partners like the California office of Emergency services in making timely decisions during disasters and when it comes to disaster response up-to-date weather intel can be critical We're constantly monitoring weather and sharing that with our operational area partners and Departments across our region to make sure that they're prepared and have that intelligence resource available to make those decisions on a moment's notice Because weather and fuel conditions are key ingredients in fire behavior accurate and consistent insights help incident commanders make decisions to contain wildfires and save lives California is going to benefit that based on if there's evacuations that need to occur Notifications that need to be placed warnings that need to be put out there The weather balloon gathers four aspects of meteorological information Air temperature moisture wind speed and direction and pressure This data is collected from heights of up to 80,000 feet That information is transmitted in real time to a central weather station where analysts log the data The information that we get from the weather balloon and what feeds our weather models is Ultimately how we're able to kind of do the magic of hey I know it's calm now, but we're gonna have 50 mile per hour winds this afternoon I know it's cool now, but the temperature is going to be up around a hundred The process to release the weather balloon is fully automated at a computer in the National Weather Services San Diego office Meteorologists can communicate with the system fill the balloon with hydrogen initiate the launch let it go and Monitor the data with a few mouse clicks Ultimately, that's how we make a forecast and how we warn All of our users the public our partners when something hazardous is going to happen before it happens To see more from us visit news.caloes.ca.gov and follow us on all our social media platforms