Remarkable Women: Louisiana woman hopes to inspire next generation of accountants
Before taking on her new leadership role, she worked on the state and local tax committees. Kaigler's journey in the accounting world started over 15 years ago as a way to care for her son. She's proud of herself for not letting her struggles or challenges stop her from chasing her dreams and creating a legacy.
'I encourage my son to also enter the accounting profession. He is three years post-grad and he is an accountant as well. So just creating this family legacy of accountants is, I think, is remarkable in itself,' Kaigler said.
She is also a Capital Region 500 winner. Kaigler said although awards aren't everything, she wants the next generation to know that success is attainable.
'It's important too for individuals to see where you are today. But I think it's most important for people to know where you started because it's truly, it's truly a long-distance race,' Kaigler said.
Remarkable Women: Sashika Baunchand's organization mentors young Louisiana girls
Kaigler's mission is to show students there are endless opportunities under the accounting umbrella. She travels statewide to speak to college students in accounting courses and young kids grades K-12.
'All of those teachable moments and mentors and people that inspire me. I'm glad to be in to be able to pay that forward and inspire others,' Kaigler said.
She said there's room for everyone in the accounting world.
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Remarkable Women: Louisiana woman hopes to inspire next generation of accountants
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WIRED
4 days ago
- WIRED
Private Companies Are Now Gathering Weather Data for NOAA
Aug 9, 2025 7:00 AM WindBorne Systems is one of several companies launching balloons, drones, buoys, and other devices to provide critical data to the beleaguered agency's National Weather Service, but they can't fill all the gaps. Photograph: WindBorne Systems This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. When staffing shortages caused the National Weather Service (NWS) to suspend weather balloon launches at its Kotzebue, Alaska, station earlier this year, a startup deploying next-generation weather balloons, WindBorne Systems, stepped up to fill the void. The company began selling its western Alaskan atmospheric data to the NWS in February, plugging what could have been a critical data gap in weather forecasting. Weather balloons collect real-time atmospheric temperature, humidity, wind speed, and pressure data that meteorologists use to predict the weather and understand longer-term changes to the climate. The Alaska office was one of about a dozen to suspend or scale back balloon launches in response to deep staffing cuts instituted by the Trump administration's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Critics claim that the cuts have weakened the NWS's forecasting capacity as hurricane season bears down and extreme weather events, like the floods that ripped through Texas, claim lives and destroy property. As the beleaguered weather service struggles to maintain its forecasting and other services, it's leaning on private companies to pick up the slack. For example, WindBorne, which is backed by Khosla Ventures, a venture capital firm focused on investing in companies with innovative business models and technologies, is opening five new balloon launch sites in the US this year as it expands its work with the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the parent agency of the NWS. 'We're flying more balloons every day and collecting more observations to help improve forecasts in light of some of these systems going down,' said John Dean, WindBorne's cofounder and CEO. Sofar Ocean, Black Swift Technologies, and Saildrone are among other startups with innovative technologies and AI forecasting models that are increasingly supplying NOAA with critical atmospheric and oceanic data through its Mesonet Program. Such collaboration isn't new, but former NOAA officials worry that the current administration, with its zeal for privatization, will jettison core federal observing systems and rely instead on private sector data to forecast the weather. While they lauded the companies' innovations, they said that NOAA must maintain ownership of its 'backbone' data assets like weather balloons to ensure public safety and maintain the historical climate record. New technologies, they said, should supplement NOAA's core data collection efforts rather than replace them wholesale. 'NOAA has always had a robust relationship with the private sector exactly for the sorts of things that WindBorne does,' like innovate and supply data, said Tom Di Liberto, a meteorologist and former NOAA spokesperson who is now media director at Climate Central. Under the current administration, however, 'the concern is, what is it going to replace?' If private services take the place of, rather than supplement, the agency's core data assets, that could prove problematic, because 'less data is bad,' he said. 'Are we actually saving money or just giving taxpayer dollars to a private company?' Data as a Service In the past NOAA bought sensors and hardware from companies with promising innovations to bring the technology in house. More recently, it's adopted a model of 'data as a service,' in which it buys data from companies that maintain their own hardware and intellectual property rights. 'While that can be fruitful for everyone, what I worry about is becoming so dependent on some of these innovative solutions,' said Rick Spinrad, who led NOAA during the Biden administration. 'What happens when the founder [pivots]?' The agency also needs more staffing to effectively manage the growing use of commercial data, he said. 'There's a contradictory nature to what this administration is doing, advocating for private-sector delivery of data and then removing a third of the weather service. Who's going to manage these programs and make sure they're effective?' NOAA already lost access to a vital tool developed by Saildrone for improving hurricane forecasting and warning accuracy because it didn't issue a request for contract proposals far enough in advance of hurricane season. And there are risks that come with some of the technologies the agency is becoming reliant on when they are proprietary and unique to an individual company. Agency dependence on one company for critical services or data is especially worrisome for Brad Colman, a private meteorologist who previously worked at NOAA. 'It's a vulnerable position because you now have data that you have built your forecasting system around,' he said. The company could demand more money, which could limit NOAA's ability to invest elsewhere, or have the business challenges it faces affect the product it provides the government. 'There's a contradictory nature to what this administration is doing, advocating for private-sector delivery of data and then removing a third of the weather service.' Data ownership is another crucial concern. Historically, NOAA has strived to make the commercial data it buys freely available to anyone who wants to use it for forecasting or research, said Mary Glackin, a former high-ranking official at NOAA who also worked at the Weather Company. That's best for public safety, she said.'There is no weather forecast that's produced in this country that isn't dependent on NOAA,' she said. But free and open data licensing agreements can be costly for the government, and companies often want to retain some data to sell to private buyers. In those situations, NOAA may buy data for its own purposes but withhold it from forecasters outside the agency for a set period. The first Trump administration showed a willingness to choose this latter option. A contract negotiated in 2020 with a company that had what many considered a superior hurricane forecasting model, for instance, constrained NOAA from publicly releasing the forecasts for five years, drawing criticism from hurricane specialists and private forecasters. WindBorne's Innovation WindBorne's AI-guided balloons stay aloft for months and collect vastly more data in the upper atmosphere than traditional weather balloons, which only fly for about two hours before popping and descending back to earth. Called radiosondes, after the instruments they carry, traditional weather balloons cover just a fraction of the Earth, because it is logistically challenging to launch and receive data from them over the oceans and in remote areas. WindBorne's weather balloons collect thousands of data points, at different altitudes, across a horizontal expanse. Photograph: WindBorne Systems WindBorne's balloons, in contrast, can collect and distribute data from remote regions. That makes them more adaptive, and especially useful for monitoring atmospheric rivers that bring extreme precipitation to coastal regions, said Glackin. 'I'd like to see them in the suite of observing systems.' The company deploys about 100 balloons from six launch sites globally, a fraction of the 92 launch sites operated by NOAA, but it aims to expand to launch up to 10,000 balloons globally over the next five years, Dean said. Windborne's data is less costly than radiosonde data 'on a per observation or per station basis,' Curtis Marshall, the director of the Commercial Data Program for the NWS, wrote in an email. And while its data is now free and open to the public, as the company expands, it wants to hold back some of the information it gathers for 48 hours so that it can sell it to private buyers, Dean said. That data would no longer be useful to other forecasters. Radiosondes' Old School Technology is Difficult to Replace Radiosondes collect one vertical profile—a line from ground level to the point where the balloon explodes—of data in the atmosphere, which is important for understanding climate change signals. WindBorne's balloons, in contrast, collect thousands of data points, at different altitudes, across a horizontal expanse. Their path is somewhat ad hoc, determined by where the wind blows them, whereas radiosondes collect data in a line rising from a location that stays the same for each launch. While WindBorne's lack of a consistent path doesn't matter for short-term weather forecasting, it could matter for understanding longer-term changes to the climate, which are currently based on decades of vertical profile data collected at the same spot, Glackin said. WindBorne's data would not be comparable with that historical record. 'We have a very cleaned-up climate record that allows us to talk about how the climate is changing,' she said. 'If all the radiosondes went away tomorrow, it would be hard to figure out what's changed, and what to attribute to technology versus what really happened in the atmosphere.' There are methods for transitioning to new instrumentation, Colman, the meteorologist who used to work at NOAA, said, but the NWS would need to proactively plan for that changeover to maintain a consistent data record. The NWS isn't moving to replace radiosondes—yet—but it is in the 'early stages' of planning for a new suite of upper atmospheric observing systems that would provide data 'substantially similar to the federal radiosonde network,' Marshall wrote. The new observing systems would come from commercially operated balloons, drones, and aircraft, and 'complement our federal balloon network.' However, Austin Tindle, a cofounder of Sorcerer, a WindBorne competitor, said that officials within NOAA are increasingly asking him 'what it could look like to be a true replacement to a radiosonde.' 'It's been a vibe shift recently, coming up in conversation a lot,' he said. WindBorne's Dean declined to respond when asked if he'd been having similar conversations. NOAA's partnership with WindBorne 'could be completely on the up and up [meaning an add-on rather than a replacement], but folks don't have a lot of trust in the broader strategy for the NOAA weather enterprise, based on everything that's happened,' said Di Liberto, citing the agency's June 25 announcement that it was permanently ending—within just five days—a vital microwave satellite program used for forecasting hurricanes. Dean at Windborne is none too eager to replace core NOAA functions. 'You're better off augmenting than you are replacing traditional weather balloons, but we want to fill gaps wherever they form,' he said. He's not alone. Tindle, whose solar-powered balloons are smaller and travel farther than WindBorne's, said that Sorcerer 'was never intended to be a replacement' for radiosondes, but to cover places in the world with no traditional balloon launches. One reason for private weather monitoring companies' caution about how much service they provide government lies in the directive that federal agencies have to serve the public, which is sometimes mismatched with business interests. A Sofar solar-powered, satellite-connected buoy for measuring ocean-atmospheric dynamics is readied for deployment in advance of Hurricane Ian in 2022. Sofar collaborated with NOAA to enhance hurricane forecasting in a project that was discontinued this year by budget cuts. Photograph: US Naval Research Laboratory Scientific Development Squadron VXS-1 One of Sofar's thousands of solar-powered, satellite-connected buoys that are deployed in five oceans around the world to capture real-time data on waves, weather, and sea surface temperature. Photograph: Sofar 'The mandate of the government is not ours,' said Tim Janssen, a cofounder of Sofar, which has created a network of buoys that deploy from vessels and aircraft with sensors to monitor ocean conditions. 'It would be impossible for us to spend millions of dollars to do something just for societal benefit, [when] there isn't a direct business case.' Sofar provides shipping companies with forecasts to help them plan the safest and most fuel-efficient routes and partners with the US Navy, NOAA, and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. 'The biggest concern for us over the last months has been the [lack of] awareness around the importance of those partnerships,' Janssen said, noting an increasing attitude of, 'Let's just rip it out and industry will take care of it. That is a nonsensical idea.' But the NWS may find itself backed into a corner, with limited options to gather, analyze, and distribute critical weather information. 'If I were NOAA, I'd be looking for a cost-benefit analysis on [WindBorne], although the politics are outpacing everything else and now your back's up against the wall,' said Glackin. 'But I don't think they can dance into the secretary's office and say, here's the answer to all our problems.'
Business Journals
7 days ago
- Business Journals
Salt River Project offers tools and tips for businesses to weather Arizona's monsoon season
Some states have earthquakes, others have tornadoes — in Arizona, we get monsoons. While some monsoons are brief and cause minimal trouble, others can inflict significant damage and disrupt business operations, including power outages. When this happens, it's reassuring to know that help is available. At SRP, dedicated Strategic Energy Managers (SEM) are there to guide companies through outages and help them prepare for future monsoon-related power problems. From 'nonsoon' to monsoon: 2025 will likely see more storms This year, Arizona is expected to see a rise in monsoons. According to the National Weather Service (NWS), monsoon season is projected to 'lean above normal.' For businesses that depend on uninterrupted services, the prospect of monsoon-related outages can be daunting. But SRP is at the ready to ensure its business partners remain informed and supported at all times. 'SRP prepares year-round for the monsoon season and summer season,' says Pedro Rios, Valued Business Customer Energy Manager (SEM) for SRP. 'We do planned maintenance and have monitoring devices in place that will alert us to any interruptions in the SRP grid.' Rios explains that alerts to the grid prompt an immediate response to safely restore power. At the same time, businesses are kept up to date on all phases of a power outage until power is restored. expand Keeping businesses continuously prepared and informed When signing up for an SRP account, business customers receive: eNotes: SRP sends text and email alerts to customers notifying them of an outage, its location, the reason for the outage and an estimated restoration time. 'These [messages] are updated as the outage goes on, and customers receive a notification when the outage is over and power is back on,' Rios explains. Business Outage Planning Checklist: Customers can access a full checklist of business continuity plans, equipment safety, emergency and safety protocols, and employee and customer preparedness for monsoon-related outages at Monsoon Season Webinar: Just over 10 minutes, this SRP webinar instructs businesses how to proactively plan for monsoon season and beyond. Assigned Strategic Energy Manager (SEM): Each business has a dedicated SEM to contact regarding all SRP-related energy needs. They help companies optimize energy usage, reduce costs, improve energy efficiency and prepare and remain informed about weather-related outages. 'If there's an outage, your SEM can report it on your behalf and relay key information, like the estimated restoration time and, if available, the cause,' Rios says. 'Our goal is always to restore power within two hours. If it extends beyond that, outage eNotes will keep you up to date with the latest timeline.' expand Stay safe during outages Safety is among SRP's top priorities. Downed power lines are a major safety concern, and often, individuals are unsure about what to do if they encounter one. 'We always advise SRP customers that if they're near or around those power lines, to always assume that they're live and stay away,' Rios says. 'The guidance is a minimum of 100 feet of distance between you and the power line; think of staying 'two semi trucks' distance away and call 911 when it is safe to do so.' 'It's recommended that you shuffle away from a downed power line, rather than walking or running away, to reduce the risk of shock,' Rios adds. Routinely practice monsoon safety and preparedness One of the best ways to ensure your business is monsoon-ready is to practice safety and emergency protocols throughout the year, such as assigning an emergency and safety point of contact, taking inventory of equipment and applying backup storage when needed, as examples. 'SRP recommends [companies] practice going through an outage,' Rios says. 'If you can practice it, even if it's once or twice a year, then when it does come that time, it will be almost second nature as opposed to a panic reaction.'
E&E News
06-08-2025
- E&E News
NWS can now fill hundreds of jobs. Some experts say it's not enough.
The National Weather Service has gotten permission to fill hundreds of positions after losing more than 600 employees since the start of the year from layoffs, early retirements and other staff reductions initiated by the Trump administration. The news was first reported Tuesday by CNN, which noted that 450 new hires had been authorized. POLITICO's E&E News confirmed the development with a person familiar with the move, who was granted anonymity to speak without fear of reprisal. The person also said NWS Director Ken Graham has been given direct hiring authority to fill hundreds of positions across the country. The new hires will include an earlier authorization, announced in June, for NWS to hire 126 employees. As of July, these 126 positions had not yet been advertised on the federal government's official hiring website. Advertisement The latest announcement is a 'very important move' toward rebuilding the agency's depleted ranks, according to Louis Uccellini, a former NWS director. 'It's a good sign that they're recognizing the importance of the NWS in public safety to hire those people back,' he added.
