Why giant balloons are in the sky above Saskatoon

See that balloon way up there? It's a weather balloon and it's new to our province. The balloon is a critical tool for forecasters like me and for storm chasers. You need balloons to have accuracy. No balloons, no accuracy. And that's been a huge, huge problem. Like the worst I've ever seen this year. You know, I know wildfires play a play and all the other stuff that comes with it. But yeah, the weather, weather balloons and having more of is a, to me, a huge thing. Why do you not want to know if a tornado is coming? Saskatchewan is known for its severe and fast-changing weather. Our province has already seen more than double the amount of tornadoes we usually get in a year, along with destructive hail and widespread flooding. Predicting the weather here is pretty important. Weather balloons can help us do that, but we haven't had them here until this summer when Environment and Climate Change Canada started sending balloons up above Saskatoon. It's pretty exciting to have more upper air station data. The more we have across North America, across Canada, the better. Once the balloons are released, they go really high, up to 30 kilometres above us, and they expand as they travel up, expanding to as big as a house at their peak. An instrument called a radiosonde is attached to the balloon. This captures atmospheric data on temperature, moisture and wind along the balloon's journey. Once the balloon pops, the data is fed to forecasting models and out to meteorologists and storm chasers. The goal? Better forecast accuracy and better storm alerts. But when we actually get the observational data, it really can ground truth some of the stuff we see in the models and really give us a solid understanding of what the air mass is doing at that point at that time. Weather balloons are used across Canada, and we joined in this summer, but it's not a permanent change. Environment and Climate Change Canada plans to stop sending up balloons in Saskatoon skies in mid-September, and there will once again be a void in weather data here. The agency is not ruling out launching more weather balloons here in the future, potentially permanently. However, it's not said when or where that might happen. Alistair Alders, CBC News, Regina.