News Summary

• An AI forecaster is only as good as the observations that feed it, and lately those have run thin.
• The blind spot sits in the lowest few kilometres of the atmosphere, the layer where most of our weather happens.
• For decades that slice was measured by radiosondes, the instrument-laden balloons launched twice a day from stations worldwide.
• As those launches thin out, so does the data, and the timing could hardly be worse for an industry racing to build the smartest forecasts money can buy.