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If the Solar Impulse project is anything to go by, it's hopelessly dependent on good weather to be able to sustain flight. For example, if you were dealing with aviation on a regular basis, you'd know that there are these things called "upper altitude winds" which regularly reach speeds in excess of 100kts even at fairly low altitudes (~10000-15000 ft) and given that the Solar Impulse's cruise speed is around 35 kts, it'd simply get blown all around the place, almost like a balloon. At that point, you might as well just junk the idea of heavier than air flight and just stick your comms antennas on a solar-powered blimp. And given the atrocious coverage such a system would provide vs. space satellites, means you'd need probably like tens of thousands of those in constant upkeep, just to give you decent coverage. For global "satcom" phone coverage, it's much easier to just launch 20-30 small polar orbit satellites, which are on stable orbits and give you global coverage at the same time - and we've already done that. For internet access and broadcasting, just build radio masts, which are cheap as heck and require almost no maintenance, or a couple of high-power GEO satellites to cover a whole continent - and we've already done that too. And as for NGOs and high-altitude surveillance, what you want is a blimp, not an airplane.
Put simply, solar-powered airplanes are a solution in search of a problem.

As a retired weather guy with over 25 years working with and training weathermen, this is one of the best tools I've seen. Applause!

Understanding fluid flow and visualizing it is not easy, but it crucial to meteorology because that dynamic drives and reveals the mechanisms that create the weather systems we track, such as fronts, storms, and so on. Given the tools seen are usually something like this (from ADDS) or this (from CoolWx), the WindMap does a much more intuitive job of showing the strength and patterns in merging flow.

So, well done! The only improvement I can think of for better use operationally would be an hourly looper of, say, the past six hours with a 3-4 second pause for each hour. This would let you track specific features as the day goes on.

Or, if you can somehow detect the snow, you could fully automate it. But doing it purely based on temperature would be wasteful because a lot of the time you have cold without snow.

Aviation (and I'm sure other applications) use "precipitation discriminators" in many of our weather stations to tell if it is raining, snowing, etc. I don't know the technical details of how they work, but they're used all over the place. No reason they couldn't be applied to the suggestion of only using the heating element when needed. Even with as little information as temperature/dewpoint spread, when it gets small enough we know to watch out for the high probability of icing.

You wouldn't need a station at every intersection. Hell, there are enough airports in Ohio alone with AWOS/ASOS systems that you could probably just use their data and err on the side of caution.

Aviators everywhere depend on NOAA for weather all the time and AOPA will never let this bill get passed. AOPA has a long history of protecting the citizens from stupid laws like this so I'm not worried at all.

You're going to have a lot of angry/annoyed pilots once they find out they can't use websites such as aviationweather.gov, duats.com, and duat.com just to name a few.

Yet another stupid bill brought to you by Corporate America(R).

I think it's also worth mentioning the ADDS site. It is somewhat aviation-oriented, but is a great site with a lot of good weather-related information. http://adds.aviationweather.gov/

The main cause is still the pilot though

Not checking weather
Not turning around when caught in bad weather
Then not being able to control his airplane due to his lack of planning, lack of training, and of course the weather.

You want a high profile example of how weather kills. Do a search for J.F. Kennedy Jr and see why he crashed is airplane.

How do I know this well it should be obvious, I'm a pilot, well not quite yet a student pilot and a good 1/4 of the ground school revolves around weather.

But what has those companies in an uproar is not aviation, naval, or industrial weather reporting, but the weather chanel style weather put out to Joe Blow. The professional version have been avialable online for free for years and before that over the teletype and phone. The only problem is to the lay person they can be difficult to interpret. If they integrate the data into a simplified website the private companies would have a tough time competing.

Check them out. http://www.aviationweather.gov/

ttp:wwwnoaagov

A PLETHORA OF SFC AND UPPER LEVEL FEATURES BEGINNING TO SPAWN
DEEP MOIST CONVECTION IN NRN IA, WILL EVOLVE INTO A MCS LATER
TONIGHT AND LIKELY MOVE INTO THE NRN PORTIONS OF THE CWA.
CONCURRENTLY... wtf is MCS? CWA?

A lot of surface and upper level features beginning to spawn deep moist heat transfer in northern Iowa will evolve into a group of thunderstorms later tonight, and likely move into the northern portions of the area concerned by this bulletin.