Landing a WindBorne Balloon in the Eye of Typhoon Dolphin
For many years, the WindBorne team has dreamed of getting one of our vertically controllable Global Sounding Balloons (GSBs) into the eye of a tropical cyclone. It is…
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Landing a WindBorne Balloon in the Eye of Typhoon Dolphin
For many years, the WindBorne team has dreamed of getting one of our vertically controllable Global Sounding Balloons (GSBs) into the eye of a tropical cyclone. It is…
Forecasting Northeast's Strongest Blizzard in a Decade: A WeatherMesh-6 Case Study
The Blizzard of 2026 put more than 40 million people across eight states under blizzard warnings, one of the largest snowstorms to hit the region in a decade1.…
What’s New in WeatherMesh-6
The most skillful global weather model WeatherMesh-6 (WM-6) Global is the most skillful medium-range forecasting model to date, whether NWP or AI. Operating at…
Inside UK's Record Wind Month: How MetaMesh Forecasted the March 11-13 Storm
March 2026 was the highest-generation on record for British wind, up 38% on 2025. Wind and solar energy displaced roughly 21 TWh of gas imports, worth about £1…
Introducing MetaMesh: The Best of Every Model, in One Forecast
No single weather model gets everything right. NWP models like ECMWF IFS and GFS encode decades of physics but run on fixed schedules with coarse update cycles. AI…
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WindBorne Mission Viewer
Weather balloons see things. They cross oceans at the dead of night. Drift through cloud layers over Finland while the ground is dark and asleep. Hold altitude for…
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WindBorne at AR Recon
Last week, I had the opportunity to spend some time with the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes (CW3E) in sunny and warm La Jolla, California… except it…
Closing the Data Gap: How WindBorne's Weather Balloons are Changing the Forecast System in Africa
Across Sub-Saharan Africa, farmers make decisions with limited data. Plant now or wait? Harvest early or risk the storm? For millions of people whose livelihoods…
Models Missed Signals for a Cold December… Or Did They?
On December 2nd I was tasked with making a middle of the month forecast for temperature anomalies in the densely populated eastern U.S. My first instinct was to look…
Weathering with WindBorne
Ellie Yoon · Weathering with WindBorne Why Weather? Weather affects everyone, anywhere, and at any time. Since childhood, I’ve been fascinated by the ever-changing…
WeatherMesh-5c Release Notes
The atmosphere doesn't stick to six-hour cycles. Your weather forecast shouldn't either. Traditionally, global weather models run just four times a day, at 0z, 6z,…
UA1093 Update
UA1093 NTSB Preliminary Report Update Today, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) released its preliminary report on the UA1093 incident. WindBorne has…
Atmospheric River Reconnaissance
Atmospheric River Reconnaissance — AMS.
Hardware and Software Changes
Since its founding in 2019, WindBorne has conducted more than 4,000 launches. We have been coordinating with the FAA for the entire history of the company and file…
UA1093
On Thursday, 16 October, Foreign Object Debris (FOD) struck the windshield of UA1093, a 737 MAX aircraft, at approximately 36,000 ft. WindBorne began investigating…
Version Zero on Day What?!
10:00 It is a crisp Monday morning in January. I enter uncharted territory: 910 San Antonio Rd, Palo Alto, California. WindBorne Systems’ headquarters. A place of…
Flying Into the Eye
WindBorne Systems has been experimenting with altitude control and navigation to collect observations closer to the centers of tropical cyclones. Recently, our…
Build Your Own Loonicon
Build Your Own Loonicon — WindBorne.
Meet the AI Agents of Atlas
Atlas Journal Entry | 202X I am the planet. Each of my balloons is a synapse, each measurement a whisper of what's to come. Within seconds I integrate and feed…
Launch Logs: Anne / NY
A Woman for All Seasons We've come a long way since that first cold/snowy January day when I started. Jack as my friend from day one. As a lover of all things in the…
WindBorne AI DA
WindBorne has developed an AI data assimilation (DA) system that officially closes the loop on utilizing our Global Sounding Balloon (GSB) observations to improve…
WeatherMesh-4 Technical Blog
A few weeks ago, our commercial customers received the latest update to WeatherMesh, WeatherMesh-4 (WM-4). WM-4 is up to 42.4% more accurate than its predecessor,…
Onboarding: 30 Days as a Loonie
Loonies haven’t zulip’d me any negative feedback about my last blog post and John hasn’t fired me for accidentally sharing top secret intellectual property... so in…
The Coldboot Attack
At WindBorne, the extreme environments we operate in can pose a challenge for our onboard flight software. Most commercial electronics are rated for temperatures down…
Validating Our Sensors: A WindBorne x CW3E Collaboration
A WindBorne x CW3E Collaboration At WindBorne, we're constantly pushing to validate and improve our Global Sounding Balloon (GSB) technology. When our Meteorology…
Onboarding: 8 Day Loonie Log
From Brooklyn to Balloons It's been a whirlwind introduction to life as the Content Lead at WindBorne. And as I edit this I chuckle at my own naïveté - such surprise…
Planetary Boundary Layer (PBL) Showcase
The Planetary Boundary Layer (PBL) is the critical region extending from ground level to 1-2 kilometers above Earth's surface - understanding it is essential for…
Where Goats Roam and Weather Data Flows: Field Notes from Our Cape Verde Launch Site
It's 7:45 AM in Cidade Velha, Cape Verde, and I have already broken a slight sweat walking several steps in 78% humidity. A curious goat watches as I check our…
WeatherMesh-3: Fast and accurate operational global weather forecasting
WeatherMesh-3: Fast and accurate operational global weather forecasting — arXiv.
Flight W-2162: The Odyssey of a WindBorne Global Sounding Balloon
Introduction On January 18, 2025, one of WindBorne’s AI-enabled, long-duration Global Sounding Balloons (GSBs), launched from Palo Alto, California and embarked on an…
WeatherMesh-2 Case Studies: Key Variables, Atlantic Hurricanes, and Winter Storms
Takeaways Headline variables: WM-2 predicts core forecasting metrics across the Earth’s surface and atmosphere about 8% to 24% more accurately than GFS, HRES, and…
How WindBorne Navigated First-Ever Balloon-Deployed Dropsondes Directly Into Hurricane Milton
Earlier this month, Hurricane Milton took the lives of at least 14 people and caused an estimated $50 billion in damages when it ravaged the Gulf Coast. The storm…
NOAA/EMC Case Study: How WindBorne Atmospheric Data Significantly Improves GFS Storm Ground Track Accuracy
Takeaways Atmospheric data is a critical missing input for building more accurate weather models, including conventional physics-based models and AI-based models. A…
How WindBorne’s Newest AI Forecasting Model is Primed to Tackle the Global Weather Resolution Gap
Takeaways Most global weather models aren’t able to forecast beyond 0.1 and 0.5 degree resolution, which makes it difficult to offer useful forecasts in areas with…
How WindBorne’s Self-Flying Weather Balloons Navigate the Sky to Sense the Globe
The first version of an unmanned weather balloon was invented more than 200 years ago. However, until WindBorne, weather balloons have faced critical limitations.…
Engineering Notebook: Making WindBorne’s Balloon Comms Self-Sufficient with Radio
Engineering Notebook is a series told directly by WindBorne’s technical team that explores what it looks like to experiment and solve problems across our tech…
Mission Snapshot: Pre-Empting a Tornadic Nebraska Thunderstorm with WindBorne Balloons
A look back at how highly targeted WindBorne balloon missions gathered critical weather data before and during a spring 2024 continental U.S. tornadic storm Late last…
Meet WindBorne's Three-Part Tech Stack
Get introduced to the three core layers of our tech stack: the balloon platform, flight autonomy software, and AI-based weather forecasting Layer 1: The Balloon…
AI Forecasting Case Study: Predicting the 2022 Global Storm Season
Our AI global forecast model, WeatherMesh, which we announced in February, continues to exceed major forecasts such as the National Weather Service’s Global Forecast…
Now Live: Explore Our AI Forecast Outputs & Benchmarks
In February, we announced our record-breaking AI-based global forecasting model, WeatherMesh, with key benchmark results. In that release, we shared for the first…
How We Built Our Record-Breaking AI Model, WeatherMesh
Yesterday WindBorne revealed the scale of its forecasting accuracy for the first time, namely that WindBorne’s WeatherMesh is the world’s most accurate global…
AI Forecasting Case Study: Predicting Hurricane Ian
WindBorne’s state-of-the-art AI global forecast model, named WeatherMesh, produces the most accurate global weather forecasts available as measured by RMSE. Our deep…
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