Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Tuesday, April 7th.

I'm Belle Lynn for the Wall Street Journal.

In America's Tornado Alley, storms frequently rift through states like Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska.

We look at how meteorologists in the region are using drones to help close a critical gap in tracking the weather.

Then, in San Francisco, the heart of America's AI boom, two of the world's most important tech companies are racing toward potentially record-breaking IPOs by the end of the year.

We're taking an inside look at Open AI and Anthropics Financials and

what they tell us about what could be next for the two companies. But first, researchers

are testing whether drones can capture real-time data that's essential for tracking storms

and helping meteorologists forecast the weather.

Michael Tab reported on this for the journal, and he joins us now to discuss how the tech works

and why drones could become the new standard for collecting storm data. So, Michael, why are

meteorologists using drones in places like Oklahoma? A lot of the information that meteorologists look at for forecasting comes from ground stations

when you're looking for data on what's happening close to the ground.

There are satellites that can tell you what's happening really high up in the atmosphere,

but this middle region is really,

really challenging to measure. So we have weather balloons that are launched from dozens of

sites all over the country, but they're very spread out. So there are often hundreds of miles

between these weather balloon launch sites, and they are only launched about twice a day. So there are major data gaps

that impact how much meteorologists are really able to tell in fine detail what's going to happen.

And this is actually a perfect area for unmanned aerial vehicles to really shine,

because you can, for relatively low cost,

launch systems to heights of 5,000 feet,

...