Weather Balloon Launcher Robots and Where ABB Fits

At least twice a day, at somewhere between 900 and 1,300 sites around the world, a balloon goes up carrying a small instrument called a radiosonde. For most of the last century a person walked it outside and let go. At more and more stations that job now belongs to a weather balloon launcher, an automatic station in a container that checks the sonde, fills the balloon and releases it on schedule. This post traces the job from hand launches to these robot stations, covers this autumn's news from short-staffed US weather offices and ends with where ABB robots could fit.

Incident meteorologist Dan Borsum and fire behavior analyst trainee Phil Knard prepare a weather balloon launch at Mammoth Hot Springs, Yellowstone, 2016. Photo: NPS / Neal Herbert via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

How meteorologists sent balloons up by hand

Kites came first. Scientists flew instruments on them in the second half of the 19th century, but a kite stays tied to the ground, is hard to control in gusty wind and cannot climb very high. In 1892 Gustave Hermite and Georges Besançon in France were the first to send a meteograph up on a balloon. From 1896 Léon Teisserenc de Bort launched hundreds of balloons from his observatory at Trappes, and in 1898 he made the launches a daily routine. In 1902 he announced the discovery of the tropopause and the stratosphere. His instruments only recorded their readings, so nobody saw the data until someone found the instrument after it landed.

Preparing to launch America's first sounding balloon, St. Louis, 15 September 1904. Photo: NOAA Photo Library via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Radiosondes removed that wait by sending their readings down by radio. Robert Bureau in France flew the first true radiosonde on 7 January 1929, and Pavel Molchanov flew his own design on 30 January 1930. Molchanov's sonde turned its readings into Morse code, so any radio operator could take them down. In the United States, the National Weather Service has taken radiosonde observations since the late 1930s. For decades the routine stayed manual. Someone filled a latex balloon with hydrogen or helium, hung the sonde 25 to 35 metres below it and walked out to let go about an hour before the 00 and 12 UTC observation times. NOAA put the cost at up to four hours of staff time a day at each site.

US sailors launch a radiosonde at a military airport in 1943; the white box is the instrument and the red cloth its parachute. Photo: Radio News via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The instrument maker Vaisala introduced the first automatic sounding station in 1994. Its Autosonde could make up to 24 launches between loading visits, and about 100 were installed around the world before a new model replaced it. In the United States, NOAA scientists evaluated autolaunchers at the National Weather Service field support center in Sterling, Virginia, and the first unit went to Kodiak, Alaska, in 2015. Tests at Kodiak gave a 98 percent success rate. By May 2018 two of Alaska's 13 upper-air sites were using autolaunchers, the rest were due within two years, and NOAA expected to save $20 million over the 20-year life of the Alaska equipment.

A balloon rises from an autolauncher during a test run at the National Weather Service Field Support Center in Sterling, Virginia. Photo: NOAA (public domain)

Staff cuts and robot launch stations today

Staff shortages put the launches in the news. In March 2025, after NOAA layoffs, the National Weather Service suspended all balloon launches at Omaha and Rapid City and cut offices including Green Bay, Gaylord and North Platte to one flight a day. North of the border, CBC reported in August 2026 that Environment and Climate Change Canada had set up a mobile upper-air station in Saskatoon after a summer of severe storms. The same report noted that US cuts had meant fewer launches near Canada. On 7 October 2026 the Green Bay office went back to two launches a day, after running on one since mid-May, as the agencies rebuild their staff.

A staff member launches a weather balloon at an open house of the Quad Cities National Weather Service office in Davenport, Iowa, 2005. Photo: NOAA Photo Library via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Automatic stations keep the schedule when people are short. Vaisala's current AUTOSONDE AS41, introduced in 2018, holds 60 radiosondes, enough for about a month of two soundings a day, and a loading visit takes about half a day. It runs the ground check on each sonde itself, and Vaisala says it saves 1,800 on-site staff hours a year compared with a manual station. More than 50 were sold on six continents in under three years. New launch sites are still being added. From November 2026 to March 2027, the CW3E team at Scripps Institution of Oceanography will launch from a new site at Shasta College in Northern California, every two to three hours during atmospheric river storms.

A Vaisala RS92 (left) and an RS41, the radiosonde the AUTOSONDE AS41 uses, both recovered after flights from De Bilt in the Netherlands. Photo: FW / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

ABB does not make a balloon launcher, and none of the sources link its robots to one, so any fit is a possibility. Inside an autolauncher the work is a chain of handling steps: take a sonde from its tray, check it, tie it to a balloon, fill the balloon and release it. Dedicated machines do that, and ABB arms would fit around them. A GoFa CRB 15000 cobot can share space with people without fences, limits its force with torque sensors in its joints and has protection up to IP67, so it could load trays in a service depot. The compact IRB 1100, which ABB aims at electronics plants, is the kind of arm that assembles small devices like radiosondes. Such cells are usually tested first in RobotStudio.

Moving an ABB GoFa CRB 15000 by hand. Torque sensors in each joint let it feel contact. Photo: ABB

Where weather balloon launches go next

Other companies are rethinking the single-use balloon. On 7 October 2026 the Swiss company Meteomatics launched Strato, a four-rotor drone that has flown to 10,438 metres and lands back on its pad to fly again. Earlier this year Meteomatics began feeding drone data to the National Weather Service for operational forecasts in Oklahoma. WindBorne Systems keeps about 700 balloons aloft and steers them by changing altitude, bleeding air or dropping sand ballast. On 12 October it won a US Air Force data contract worth up to $49 million. For now, as the Green Bay forecasters explained, the balloon profile is still the starting point that forecast models are fed.

A Meteomatics Meteodrone on display at the Swiss Museum of Transport, 2022. Photo: Lukasjmueller / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

For households the payoff shows up on a phone. Jeri Wilcox of Scripps told KRCR that when a balloon goes up during an atmospheric river, the next day's forecast on your phone is informed by its data. Some sondes end up with hobbyists. In Australia, where the Bureau of Meteorology sends up about 42 balloons a day from 38 sites, radio hobbyists track flights with tools like SondeHub and go out to recover the sondes. The numbers matter for factories too: Australia uses roughly 15,000 balloons a year and the United States about 76,600, so building sondes and filling launcher trays are repetitive jobs where robot arms could one day help.

Close-up of an ABB robot picking parts in a switchgear assembly cell. Photo: ABB

A launch costs around 500 US dollars, which limits how often some countries can fly. Gas is another constraint. In March 2025 the Boulder and Tallahassee offices were not launching at all because of a helium shortage. Hydrogen costs less but is flammable, which is why the Australian bureau tells people to stay 10 metres back from a balloon that is still inflated. Automatic stations do not remove people either. They need restocking, about an hour every 12 days in NOAA's figures, and maintenance at one, five and ten year intervals, so the job moves from letting balloons go to keeping machines loaded and working.

An engineer programs an ABB SWIFTI CRB 1100 cobot with a tablet at a small workshop bench. Photo: ABB

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