The Future of Free Weather Data on the Internet

An anonymous reader writes "The National Weather Service wants to update a 1991 policy that limits what data it can put on the Internet. The proposed new policy makes putting free data on the Internet official. The Private Weather Sector wants NWS to provide its new digital forecasts only in specialized data formats and would like NWS to shut down new XML data feeds. Barry Myers (MS Word doc), president of Accuweather wants you to have pay before using Kweather and other similar tools. Myers is asking friends to comment against the new NWS policy by June 30. Should we have to pay twice to get weather forecasts?"

Comments

It should be free

[bobhagopian]

Nobody should ever have to pay for a service which provides the same information as a quick look out the window does. And if they do charge something for it, the vast majority of people *will not* pay.

Re:It should be free

[OneDeeTenTee]

Nobody would pay for that. They'd look out the window instead.

The question is paying for quantified data from entire regions and predictions.

Our tax money is used for the collection of much of this data and that (if nothing else) ought to be freely available.

Re:It should be free

[bickerdyke]

But you dont get that with KWeather either.

Re:It should be free

[dave420]

So you can tell the weather hundreds of miles from you by looking out the window? Damn you have a finely tuned spidey-sense.

Re:It should be free

[Just Some Guy]

You must live someplace with incredibly boring weather. I grew up in Missouri ("If you don't like the weather, wait 5 minutes") and consider accurate weather forecasting to be critically important to business, recreation, and flat-out not getting killed by the nastier varieties.

Telling me the current conditions in my present location isn't terribly interesting, but that's not all you get from NWS's data services.

Re:It should be free

[4of12]

consider accurate weather forecasting to be critically important to business,

Absolutely.

I remember years ago visiting a private weather forecasting outfit in the central valley of California, probably one of the richest agricultural producing regions in the world.

They had very impressive facilities and were able to provide farmers with the detailed kinds of information about soil moisture, predicted rainfall, temperatures high and low, what the weather was forecast to be on a hourly basis, etc. This was many years ago when all you could get from the NWS was today's weather, tomorrows forecast for a region that was 100 km across.

I think the government should provide the free weather data to the taxpayers that support them. It's a public benefit that costs little to do. The right to make money based on artificial scarcity is not constitutionally protected.

There's still plenty of room in the marketplace for real value added services that the average taxpayer is not yet willing to pay for but which the farmer or marine navigator is very keen to know about.

Re:It should be free

[penguinboy]

You have your own weather satellites and RADAR systems all over the country?

Who pays for it?

[Mazem]

Who pays for the National Weather Service? If it is taxpayer money then setting up a pay-service on the internet seems counter-intuitive.

Re:Who pays for it?

[log2.0]

What if you will be going on a picnic TOMORROW and want to know if it will be raining?

Watch the news ;)

Re:Who pays for it?

[Gabrill]

Does the weather information come under the freedom of information act? Can that act be used to thwart this scheme?

Re:Who pays for it?

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Be assured, this is all part of a plan to privatise the weather services. Big companies want your money and gaining a monopoly over services and goods you need is the best way to get it.

Re:Who pays for it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who pays for the National Weather Service? If it is taxpayer money then setting up a pay-service on the internet seems counter-intuitive.

Only as counter-intuitive as toll highways.

Re:Who pays for it?

[osgeek]

Yes, it does fall under the FOIA. All weather forecasts will be published in an open format for anyone who wants to see them -- a mere five years after they are made.

Rejoice in the freedom of information act.

Re:Who pays for it?

[Anonymous Coward]

What if I am an ameture bird watcher and want to calculate thermal coverage in Nevada? FoxNews won't help me there...

Re:Who pays for it?

[ichimunki]

So a government monopoly on weather services benefits us how exactly? Whenever taxpayers subsidize a service that could be provided in the marketplace, that subsidy undermines the development of true competition for that service.

Seems to me that even with all the media consolidation that's gone on, no one media company would ever have a monopoly on weather prediction. Perhaps eventually they would all subcontract to the same firm, similar to what is being proposed here (if not already being done in fact).

By the way, the statement "big companies want your money..." is a type of ad hominem attack (their motives are not relevant to the validity of their argument). Not only that, I should think it's obvious that all companies, large and small, are in business to make a profit. Additionally, given how much of my income goes to the government on an annual basis (hint: every eight hour day I put in, the first three hours are spent working to pay the government), I think I'm rightfully more concerned about the size and scope of government than any big business.

Re:Who pays for it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Be assured, this is all part of a plan to privatise the weather services. Big companies want your money and gaining a monopoly over services and goods you need is the best way to get it.

Fine with me. All they have to do is refund the
entire expense of all the R&D and the cost of putting all those satellites in orbit, plus the cost of building and maintaining all those weather monitoring stations that my tax dollars paid for.
I'm sure Mr. Myers won't have a problem with that.
Shouldn't amount to more than a few billion dollars.

Re:Who pays for it?

[tdemark]

So a government monopoly on weather services benefits us how exactly? Whenever taxpayers subsidize a service that could be provided in the marketplace, that subsidy undermines the development of true competition for that service.

Let's use severe weather as an example.

You need a single organization for severe weather coverage to ensure public safety. Imagine if you had multiple companies issuing conflicting severe weather warnings? Since it is an issue of public safety, it makes sense to have a government agency in control of these statements.

In order to provide severe weather coverage, the government needs to:

(a) collect significant amounts of data (observations, satellite, radar)
(b) process that data into certain forms (forecasts, models, etc)

Since we are paying for this service, why should access to the data be limited?

Re:Who pays for it?

[tdemark]

For reasons of commerce, national security, and personal safety, NOAA must gather significant amounts of weather data. Furthermore, to ensure that products like severe weather statements can be issued accurately, the organization must provide data such as current conditions and forecasts.

An artificial scarcity of data does nothing to help the people paying for it via their taxes. It only serves to help the bottom lines of a few large corporations whose only responsibilities are to themselves, not the citizens of the United States.

The services that are currently "experimental" or whose ultimate availability is unknown due to pressure from certain members of the Commercial Weather Industry should become permanently and freely available to anyone wishing access to it.

Back when data dissemination costs were high, it made sense to limit the NWS role in giving data to the public. By allowing only a few organizations to have access to the data and allowing them to sell it, those organization would pay the rather high costs to ensure the data was, in fact, available.

However, now that communication costs are so low, such a method makes no sense.

A recent letter from Barry Myers to members of the Commercial Weather Industry pleading for them to come out against the NWS Partnership Policy, he stated:

"Industries grow where risk is controllable or predictable. The present path of the NWS- controlled federal policy introduces greater risk to the private sector. Not less."

In this case, he is partially right.

However, the risk he is actually talking about is the ability for large commercial weather organizations to maintain a stranglehold on the sector.

You see, the products that NOAA currently offer, themselves, pose no threat to AccuWeather or other large organizations. It is just data, and most people don't want to look at coded data. They want an end product.

By allowing data to flow freely to the public, the NWS ENCOURAGES competition to the incumbents. Barriers that prevented bright entrepreneurs from pushing new services are greatly reduced and a new era of value-added products will be born.

To this end, I see no alternative but for NOAA to provide the services it currently does in a permanent, free fashion as well as to develop other offerings that benefit the taxpayers as it sees fit.

Re:Who pays for it?

[P. Legba]

So a government monopoly on weather services benefits us how exactly?

We get free weather forecasts?

Crike.

P.

Re:Who pays for it?

[ichimunki]

Free? I guess the department is run by volunteers. Good to know.

Re:Who pays for it?

[Anonymous Coward]

So a government monopoly on weather services benefits us how exactly? Whenever taxpayers subsidize a service that could be provided in the marketplace, that subsidy undermines the development of true competition for that service.

I have no problem undermining competition in road-building or power-cable-laying, or for that matter sewer-operating. Some services ought not be provided in the marketplace, as they're sometimes more basic than can be risked on the winds of capitalism.

Weather information is the same way.

Re:Who pays for it?

[ichimunki]

You need a single organization for severe weather coverage to ensure public safety.

Prove it. I don't think the public is going to be much or less safe just because they have a single agency doing this. A single agency represents a single point of failure, and in this case what recourse does the public even have if the NOAA screws up? If there are multiple agencies, there is nothing to prevent the government from contracting the weather services it does need out to one of them.

As to conflicting warnings, I assume that most of the warnings would be the same type of stuff and that the public could make decisions based on a consensus model or majority of warnings thing. If all the major weather services are predicting dangerous weather, that seems like a better bet than if it's one small service being operated by boy scouts working on their weather merit badge.

More likely I would think that if I have health or homeowners insurance or other policies that weather is likely to affect, that the insurance company would have a preferred weather service that they would require me to use when it comes to things like whether or not to board up my windows and vacate the area.

Since we are paying for this service, why should access to the data be limited?

Good question-- but one which argues against a point I never made and have no intention of attempting defend.

Re:Who pays for it?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Rejoice in the freedom of information act."

Yes, while you still can.

Muhahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha...Cough! Cough! Cough!

Smithers! My medicine!

Re:Who pays for it?

[UnrepentantHarlequin]

So a government monopoly on weather services benefits us how exactly?

This is not about a government monopoly on weather services. The government has been providing this information for decades. It is, in fact, the very data that private weather services use to base their forecasts on. Accu-Weather and other corporations do not want to stop the government from producing this data -- they want to limit the government to providing it only to corporations, not to private citizens, so that they can resell the information that we taxpayers have already paid for back to us at a profit.

In addition, this would prevent some other entrepreneurial meteorology graduate student from using that data to make forecasts for local ski areas and eventually starting a weather company of his own ... which is how Joel Myers (Barry's brother) started Accu-Weather. This has nothing to do with a government monopoly on anything, and everything to do with protecting a few large companies from competition.

Whenever taxpayers subsidize a service that could be provided in the marketplace, that subsidy undermines the development of true competition for that service.

The private weather companies are not asking the National Weather Service to get out of the weather data collection and weather forecasting area. Those companies absolutely depend on the thousands of hourly observations collected by the NWS, on the computer forecast models generated by their supercomputers, etc. What those companies are demanding is that the NWS provide this data -- which we the taxpayers have already paid for -- only to the corporations, not to the taxpayers.

Any time Accu-Weather wants to pay to establish a network of thousands of observation stations to get the weather data they depend on, buy a few of the world's largest supercomputers and develop their own software to run models, launch satellites to track global weather, etc., then they are entirely within their rights to make that data available only to their customers. But we pay for those stations, for those supercomputers, for those satellites, and all the rest -- the very services that Accu-Weather and other corporations depend on to generate their own forecasts -- and we have every right to the data generated from them in any and every format that the National Weather Service -- the people employed by the taxpayers to do the job -- wants to give it to us, their employers, in.

Re:Who pays for it?

[ColdWetDog]

Five years? That's OK, they'll be just as accurate.

Re:Who pays for it?

[astar]

Historically, free weather reporting has been a slam dunk under the general welfare clause of the Constitution. Libertarian's often have a problem conceptualizing that there is a general welfare in which government has a role, beyond oh, maybe, military, IMO. So I want to know: How do you conceptualize the general welfare clause, and lets not forget the preamble.

People who do believe in the general welfare clause might want to click the comment link in the story and tell NOAA what they should do.

Re:Who pays for it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Prove it. I don't think the public is going to be much or less safe just because they have a single agency doing this. A single agency represents a single point of failure, and in this case what recourse does the public even have if the NOAA screws up?

Imagine this situation...

Category 3 hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico. One agency issues warnings for Texas/Louisiana Coast, the other agency issues warnings for Texas/Mexico border.

What do businesses/homeowners do? Evacuations and closings cost BILLIONS of dollars and you have two widely spaced areas that have been warned.

This shouldn't be hard to imagine because, it has happened in the past. One agency was the NWS (TX/Mexico) and the other was AccuWeather (TX/LA). Now, AccuWeather couldn't put out warnings, but they put out forecasts that differed significantly from the NWS. Luckily, people generally listen to warnings over forecasts, so there was little impact.

As far as "who is responsible", do you honestly think that AccuWeather or Landmark Communications (Weather Channel) would be in business if you could sue them for incorrect forecasts?

As to conflicting warnings, I assume that most of the warnings would be the same type of stuff and that the public could make decisions based on a consensus model or majority of warnings thing.

Bwah, ha, ha, ha, ha. Thanks, I needed a laugh.

The biggest weather threats to personal safety all develop fast and are highly unpredictable. The path and strength of hurricanes, snowstorms, and tornadic mesocyclones are hard to predict - there are too many variables and not enough observation resolution to allow to highly accurate models 100% of the time.

During these times of crisis, you want the public to weigh each of options and try and make a informed choice? In the case of tornados, seconds can be the difference between life and death.

Imagine what the public hears the night before a Nor'easter:

"Well, ABC is saying that we are going to get rain. NBC is saying 30" of snowfall by tomorrow night, KYW is forecasting a dusting, and FOX has it sunny and warm throughout the weekend."

And you want them to make a decision on this? This is the same public that has caused hair dryer manufacturers to put "Do not use while sleeping" on their product.

More likely I would think that if I have health or homeowners insurance or other policies that weather is likely to affect, that the insurance company would have a preferred weather service that they would require me to use when it comes to things like whether or not to board up my windows and vacate the area.


Homeowners insurance is based on climatological data, not on instantaneous weather conditions. As I said before, no forecast is going to protect your house if a tornado hits it; basing personal property insurance on an instantaneous occurrence doesn't make actuarial sense.

Furthermore, an insurance company will take whatever steps are necessary to limited claims. This means that they may require those covered to "close up shop" at the drop of a hat. Such closings cost those covered significant amounts of money.

On the other hand, a government agency does what is best for the public. There is no pressure to try and "scoop" the competition with an early warning (which we have seen time and time again with TV weather people). They realize that issuing warnings that prove false only wastes money and erodes confidence in their product.

Bill C.

Re:Who pays for it?

[blakestah]

There seems to be some fear-mongering, and not reading the finely written article, going on.

The proposal basically extends the current policy. By my reading of it, nothing currently available would disappear without plenty of prior notice, and in all likelihood nothing currently available would go away at all.

The Accuweather lobbying is for the raw data access to be put in a database format, completely open, instead of its current raw text format.

I don't know if any of you have programmatically gotten their data, but the downloads are oppressive due to size. A binary format would save a LOT of bandwidth, without the public-at-large lose any information.

In short, Accuweather and the NWS are not considering removing NWS information from the internet.

Re:Who pays for it?

[P. Legba]

Oh, sure...it's taxpayer-funded. But I'm sure any subscription service to AccuWeather.com would cost me personally significantly more than whatever pittance the NWS extracts from my gross pay. Why? They have to make back the money they're not getting from those who choose not to subscribe.

So the question is: Do we all benefit from a public weather service? Once you figure in emergency forecasts, farm forecasts, etc., it's difficult to conclude that we don't. Further, we don't have to rely on that pain in our knee once AccuWeather goes bankrupt trying to charge $4.99/mo for access to their RSS feed, assuming they provide one, and farmers don't have to buy forecasts in a bundle with Roundup Ready soybean seed/pesticide from ADM.

We don't all want to be beholden to entities whose only motive is profit.

P.

Re:Who pays for it?

[Random832]

You have just made an eloquent argument for allowing the government to _have_ a monopoly on _gathering_ weather data - unfortunately, the parent post was arguing against allowing the government to _give_ various companies a monopoly on _repackaging_ their data.

your move.

Re:Who pays for it?

[Anonymous Coward]

While I don't disagree with the points you are making, the word "supercomputers" makes this sound like a circa 1990 comment.

Re:Who pays for it?

[gabebear]

The new proposal does extend the public's rights to the data, however, this document by Barry Myers is arguing that the NWS doesn't have the right to publish the data they create via the web because of a 1991 Policy that states:

"The NWS will not compete with the private sector [Commercial Weather Industry] when a service is currently provided or can be provided by commercial enterprises, unless otherwise directed by applicable law."

which is slated to be repealed if the new proposal goes through. The document Myers sent out goes on to say;

"The recognition that the private weather industry is ideally suited to put the NWS information database into a form and detail that can be utilized by specific users is deleted."

People are worried because if Myers has everything he wants, then the data the NWS publishes would closed to the public. I find it unlikely this would happen, but it's amazing what lobbyists can do.

Re:Who pays for it?

[blakestah]

My reading is that the current policy states the NWS will not compete with private weather. However, the new policy would delete that proviso, and that is what Myers is pissed about. They would like a stronger enforcement of the old policy, and not the new policy.

In other words, if any party is threatened by the changes in the new policy, it is the private sector, and not the public at large, which shall continue to receive at least the level of support they currently receive.

Re:Who pays for it?

[UnrepentantHarlequin]

I'm a circa 1980 geek. :-)

Re:Who pays for it?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd be curious to hear your reaction to this comment which quotes a weather industry group as arguing for the info on the Internet being provided to the industry only:

"CWSA endorses the dissemination of all NWS data and information (including experimental) in real time without delay in Internet accessible digital form to the private sector for distribution to the public"

Re:Who pays for it?

[jamesynot]

our WA state parks and probably nation as well work this way.

Re:Who pays for it?

[calidoscope]

As far as "who is responsible", do you honestly think that AccuWeather or Landmark Communications (Weather Channel) would be in business if you could sue them for incorrect forecasts?

This is probably the strongest argument against an exclusively private weather service. The private companies are probably better off with the public having free access to NWS forecasts just for reducing liability.

As I've mentioned elsewhere, the functions of the NWS are entirely consistent with the "general welfare" and "interstate commerce" clauses of the Preamble to the US Constitution (and also the "National Defense" caluse as well - weather is important to military operations).

Re:Who pays for it?

[macdaddy]

I live in the sticks. I mean that literally. To 99% of the country I live in the middle of freaking nowhere. This town has no gas station. It doesn't have a grocery store. We have one cafe that opened less than a month ago. Main street is paved in bricks. This town has a population of 231 at the last census. You see as many horses on main street as you do trucks. By all accounts I live in a deserted area of the country (though heavily populated when compared to areas of Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, New Mexico, or western Kansas. I do however live in one of the most important areas of the country, meteorlogically speaking. I live in tornado alley. Don't know what "tornado alley" is? Lets just say that we have a helluva a lot of tornados, more so than anywhere else in the world. I live east of the nearest town with a TV station and weather dept. Take note of the word "east" because that's very important. Tornadic weather in this area almost always moves west to east in general (NW-->SE, SW-->NE, etc). More often than not our local TV stations have live coverage of all storms west of their area. No commercials, no regular programming, just wall to wall coverage of the cloud floating overhead. That all changes as soon as the storm passes their precious little town. We're only 2 counties east of the TV station(s), 90 minutes driving time from town, and yet they rarely ever bother to cover us. If we're lucky we might get a glimpse of a radar image in the corner of the screen. Beyond that we're on our own. NOAA is the only entity that seems to give a rat's ass about us. They aren't in it for the ratings like our local TV stations. They only care about weather and the areas being affected. Without NOAA we'd be up shit's creek. I have 2 NOAA pages loaded right now since a storm went through a few hours ago. NOAA's NWS pages are indespensible. Privatizing weather forecasting will only lead to them concentrating on highly populated areas. They wouldn't give a damn about us in the sticks. You know, the ones that feed this country.

Re:Who pays for it?

[Just Some Guy]

Any time Accu-Weather wants to pay to establish a network of thousands of observation stations to get the weather data they depend on

And that's assuming that this is possible. The national government can say "we're going to put this weather station in that national park", but Accu-Weather can't. I'm extremely pro-private interprise, but this is one of those national infrastructure situations where that just wouldn't make much sense.

Re:Who pays for it?

[superflippy]

I work for a university research group that is working with NOAA and other organizations to improve data collection and predictions associated with severe weather in our area. The truth is, there is not just one organization controlling all the information in the event of, for example, a hurricane.

NOAA, FEMA, and state emergency management groups work together in the event of a disaster. They create plans ahead of time as to who will do what in order to avoid confusion. So it's NOAA's responsibility to decide whether a hurricane is category 3 or 4, but it's the state EMD's responsibility to tell people what to do in the event of a hurricane.

It's important to have a detailed disaster plan to avoid exactly the kind of scenario you describe. The current plan includes everything from when the Governor should announce a highway lane reversal to the format my research group's storm surge prediction should be delivered in. The media can use this plan to know who to contact for what information, and to tell people what to expect.

And, to chime in on the topic, I think that NOAA's data should absolutely be free. Don't stifle research.

Re:Who pays for it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Kudos on the feeding the country bit. However, if I were you I'd move out of that shithole and find a more modern place to live. I'm guessing cable/DSL service isn't all that great in the sticks. And I can't imagine what the prospects for dating are like. Yeesh... look out, sheep!

Re:Who pays for it?

[macdaddy]

Actually... we have both cable TV, cable Internet access, and DSL. Our local telco is also our cable TV provider. They offer DSL in the towns in which they have a telco presence and cable modems in town in which they only have a cable TV presence. They offer long-range Ethernet to folks in the country. Wireless is also a possibility in the future. As an ISP they also happen to have first rate spam and AV filtering on email. Of course I'm a little biased. I happen to work for them, keeping their server farm up and running. :-)

Re:Who pays for it?

[plover]

This is the text of the comments I sent them. I tried carefully to close the loopholes I saw remaining in the document.

Hi,

I'd like to make a few comments on the proposed Fair Weather Policy.

Statement 4 is confusingly worded: "To advance the weather, water and climate enterprise, NWS will provide information in forms accessible to the public as well as underlying data in forms convenient to others." Does this mean that only finished products will be available to the public, while the 'underlying data' will be somehow restricted to 'others'? Please clarify this statement to indicate that the data in all forms will always be made available to the public in a timely fashion, (to the best of your abilities, of course.)

The most disturbing proposal is statement 6 in which you propose a procedure to listen to outside interests who request you "discontinue products and services." The NOAA and NWS must be the sole decision maker as to whether a specific product needs to be discontinued, and then only because the NWS has internally determined that it is being unused or underutilized, is too expensive to maintain, or has been replaced by a better product. You need to change this statement to indicate only that you will request public comment in the event that the NWS announces they wish to discontinue a specific service due to disuse.

The NDFD and XML feeds are brilliant examples of the quality data you can provide to all Americans. Shutting them down at the request of commercial enterprises who might feel threatened by your fine work effectively steals this work from those of us who paid you for it in the first place.

Thank you for your consideration.

Re:Who pays for it?

[crackshoe]

Yeah, this is a bit old. but, on the point of homeowners insurance -- those in high risk areas (read - floods every fucking year) are sold dirt cheap insurance by the US government. these people can afford to lose a house a year, and rebuild it, on taxpayer dollars. its not best for the public - the vast majority of the country isn't stupid enough to live in areas that constantly destroy houses - if we did, the government couldn't afford to take a major loss for those who wish to mooch and rebuild again and again.

Should we have to pay twice to get weather forecas

[Anonymous Coward]

Should we have to pay twice to get weather forecasts?

I don't understand how anyone is paying "twice". Please explain?

And anyway, why not just start an online open source weather network? People in every city all over the country can setup temperature and weather guages in their back yard and plug them into their computer and have them send the updated information to a central open source database every few minutes. I'm sure you could find at least one person in every major city who would be willing to do this.

Just cancelled Accuweather Premium...

[Anonymous Coward]

I have the Accuweather Premium Java App on my Sprint PCS Phone at 2.99 a month.

I just cancelled it.

AC

Shut down the National Weather Service.

[Anonymous Coward]

That way you're not forced to pay at all.

You'll also open up new opportunities for private business, free or otherwise.

Re:Shut down the National Weather Service.

[Teun]

There are international treaties regulating the free exchange of weather data between National Weather Services.
If one would quit that Nation has a problem getting the ever so important data from the rest of the world.

Besides, wether you pay for the National Service through tax or (probably several) commercial Weather Bureaus by means of subscription, it still needs to be financed.

Re:Shut down the National Weather Service.

[UnrepentantHarlequin]

Imagine the following scenario . . .

With NWS data and forecasts limited to only established corporations, rather than entrepreneurs and the private citizens who pay for them, the number of corporations providing that service will tend to shrink due to mergers, buy-outs, business failures, etc. That happens in just about every industry, and weather data and forecasting will be no exception. People would be dependant on a very few sources of weather information with no checks or balances.

Now imagine that one of those corporations provides the weather forecasts to the state of Florida. One day, their forecast shows them that there will be a hard freeze in a couple of days, which will severely damage the Florida orange crops. A few of the top-level people in that corporation delay that forecast for half a day or so, so that they have time to call their brokers and invest in frozen orange juice futures. I think you can take it from there.

There are some things so critical to the public good that the public has, over the past few hundred years, determined that it is in our best interest to jointly contribute to maintaining those services for ourselves, via our proxy, the government. (despite what some people, and a lot of politicians, forget, that is what a democratic government is: the proxy of the citizens, and the equivalent of a condo association hiring a guy to mow the lawns)

Firefighting, for instance, is one of them. We've had plenty of experience with privately run firefighting services, back in the 18th and 19th century. We found out they didn't work. They only extinguished fires in property owned by their subscribers ... which meant that small fires became major conflagrations by the time they reached the house of someone who could afford to pay a fire company. It was finally realized that, for the good of the entire city (except maybe for the marshmallow vendors) it was necessary to have a centralized fire service that responded to any fire before it could spread.

Employees in general theoretically have the best interests of their employers at heart. In the case of a public service such as the NWS, those employers are us, the citizens. In the case of a private service, those employers are the corporate officers and stockholders. When it comes to things that people's lives, safety, and livelihoods depend on, I am very reluctant to trust that service solely to people whose concern is not for the public good, not for my safety, not for a level playing field for all businesses, but solely for how much money they can gain.

And remember: Accu-Weather and the others don't want the National Weather Service privatized or abolished. They would collapse overnight if it was, because they utterly depend on its data. They want distribution of that taxpayer-funded data to be limited solely to them. They're perfectly happy with the NWS the way it is, so long as they are the only ones who can benefit from it.

Isn't this an international issue ?

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought that there was a considerable amount of cooperation between organisations across the world with regards to sharing data for weather forcasting ?

Surely if people start putting price tags on things, all that happens is that the service starts to ramp up in price and people consequently loose access to quality forcasting.

I know this sounds like an obvious 'Step 3 - Profit' plot, but weather forcasting is a literal matter of life and death, and shouldn't that take a priority over the more mundane fiscal aspects ?

Afer all, this is the real world.

private companies can do their own research

[Anonymous Coward]

any private company is free to do their own weather data collection, processing and forecasts, they can sell their forecasts to whomever they like to whatever price.
I don't see they have any right to put restrictions on that information collected by anyone else though.

A replacement will not take long

[TardisX]

If this ever happens, I estimate it would take about 1 week for a group to appear, advocating 'open source' weather data collection, another week for some client/server software to be written, and about 3 months for effectively global weather data collection.

Re:A replacement will not take long

[klmth]

Look, this is not going to happen for a simple reason: the general public doesn't sit on a metric assload of various measurment instruments.

Re:A replacement will not take long

[hussar]

Well, as a former pilot, I would be a bit concerned about the unreported, open source sonde collecting upper air data.

As for the public not sitting on a metric buttload of weather measuring gear, they weren't sitting on a metric buttload of WiFi gear at first either. If local measurement ever went open source, I suspect you'd see a lot of measuring equipment show up on the market.

Re:A replacement will not take long

[jupiter909]

I would tend to agree with what you are saying. So perhaps they are shooting themselve in the foot with this preposal of theirs.

'Open Source' weather collection would give a more accurate picture of statistics. If there are a few closed weather centers with high accuracy equipment to say a few hundred thousand people contributing to and open system. The system with more people even though running with 'poorer' equipment, would give a better overview, as the results of weather statistics is that of averages so the errors get smoothed out in the end.

I know there was/is a simular type event happening for earth quake detection. A home system that many people plugged into and then each persons meter would report to some central station. So perhaps now is the time for weather to do the same.

Re:A replacement will not take long

[mumblestheclown]

Bullshit.

Mod parent down.

I am a pilot who flies in the USA and in Europe. In the USA, weather information is free. In Europe, it is not. NO open source weather network has sprung up in europe. The TV news provides some information, but very very little of interest to pilots.

The thing is, given all the airports already in place who could benefit from this (that is to say, a distributed set of reporting stations), you'd think that your sort of community network would just spring up. Well, it hasn't and won't. Why? Because the competitive market has turned out to be a pretty efficient mechanism for bringing weather data to those who need it.

Re:A replacement will not take long

[1u3hr]

the general public doesn't sit on a metric assload of various measurment instruments.

Not that it is in any way a replacement for a government service, but The Weather Undergound of Hong Kong, and presumably affiliated groups, do have their own weather stations, though most of their data is from government observatories. But I think witout weather satellite photos, no one can conme anywhere near current state-of-the-art.

Re:A replacement will not take long

[zogger]

running your own doppler radar might get a little pricey though......

Re:A replacement will not take long

[Eye of the Frog]

There's already something similar to this. Weather Underground collects and displays data from personal weather stations. You can also access historical data from each location. Take a look at this page for an example. All they would have to do is provide a web service to report the data. If enough data is provided across the country, you could develop a distributed computing application to build weather models based on that data to forecast. But even today you have current conditions. Sure there will be pockets where stations don't exist, but as word spreads I bet they get filled. Lots of people with an interest in the weather and an always-on internet connection would be willing to buy a simple weather reporting station.

Oh, they aren't limited to the US either. Here's the list of stations in Germany for example.

Re:A replacement will not take long

[UnrepentantHarlequin]

So you have surface reporting stations. Great. And no doubt a distributed computing system could, if sufficient experts could be found to write the models, replace the NWS's supercomputers.

But what about upper air observations? How about satellite data? How about over a hundred years of historical records? How about doppler radar? How about, in other words, all of the things that you can't get from looking out the window?

They'd be damned hard to replace with a volunteer network. The existing taxpayer-owned system has billions of dollars of infrastructure. The big issue is that Accu-Weather and their cronies want that taxpayer-owned infrastructure to benefit not the taxpayers, but only themselves.

Re:A replacement will not take long

[Eye of the Frog]

Yeah, I thought about that after I posted. Hard to track hurricanes, map lightning strikes, and predict tornado touch downs with personal weather stations.

Re:A replacement will not take long

[Anonymous Coward]

NWS Computer: I'm super! Thanks for asking.

Re:A replacement will not take long

[SpaceLifeForm]

In related news today, the U.S. Government warned that talking about the weather may be considered some kind of code, and that the Department of Homeland Security will treat any reports of such activities with the same level of importance as any other terrorist threat. The DHS advises that you *only* view approved weather reports, and only for your area, and that you should only discuss those reports with the stipulation that you are commenting on *official* weather reports. Critics were quick to point out that this could lead to other problems, such as being in violation of the DMCA if you look out your window.

Re:A replacement will not take long

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact is, wunderground.com does have probably the most detailed satellite and radar integrations compared to, say, The Weather Channel's website, CNN, etc.

The fact that wunderground provides access to slightly-decoded versions of the encoded (it's not bad, think "TX" instead of "Thunderstorm", for example) NWS forecast reports is good, too.

Also, it is cool that wunderground allows people to put their own weather stations onto their site.

I guess I would argue for AccuWeather, et al. to have sole provinence of the weather, in exchange for indemnifying the US Govenrnment, NWS, et al., because you KNOW if a forecast is missed or seriously flubbed by Accu-Weather (think, "Perfect Storm"), then they will be sued by someone. The current legal setup would allow AccuWeather to simply defer to the NWS, because it's "their" data...

Yes, there are a few precidents for at least suing the NWS for flubbed forecasts or underemphasised weather reports, especially for fishing boats in Alaska.

Re:A replacement will not take long

[sjames]

For surface data, there are a great many ameture stations out there gathering information electronically. Many more record data manually. It's not like the instrumentation is all that exotic. The hard part would be the radar, satelite imagry, and balloon data. SOME of the satelite data could be replaced by ground based equipment looking UP, but would possably have a lower resolution. The balloon data seems like a potentially solvable problem. The radar would likely be simply too expensive.

Should be free.

[dj245]

We all pay taxes (OK maybe not all of us) that support things like weather sattelites, weather baloons, remote weather stations, etc. This is where the majority of the weather data comes from, and the funding comes from taxpayers ultimately. The NWS is a government agency. They compile the data from the balloons, stations, and sattelites, and make forecasts and charts and maps and graphs. Mariners, in particular, get a lot of data from the NWS directly and indirectly.

On the other hand, Accuweather is a commercial venture designed to profit by delivering weather content to television studios and radio stations. They own no balloons nor weather stations nor sattelites. Why should we have to pay them anything? They only want to diversify their grip on the nutsack of private weather.

Re:Should be free.

[BDew]

Because the government should not compete with the private sector. It's a simple enough principle, if there's something that the private sector is willing to do for-profit, then the government simply should not compete with them. Unless you want the government to also get into the software development business. Or the car making business. Or any other private venture.

Most of the posts also miss the business model. The government collects the raw data, and that is made freely available. What Accuweather and the like do is turn that raw data into value-added products like maps with pretty colors, icons, etc. They translate the science into a form that average people understand.

Your argument that they don't hold the entire system so they shouldn't hold any of it doesn't make sense. Otherwise the analogy could be extended like this: Microsoft owns Windows, so other complanies shouldn't write software for it. Apple owns the OS AND the hardware, so other companies shouldn't write software for it. These are not sentiments often found on /. Why should weather forecasting be any different?

Re:Should be free.

[bsane]

Because the government should not compete with the private sector.

So when I start my private army I can get the government to pay me and disband theirs?

I'm glad I have your support for this plan.

Re:Should be free.

[littlerubberfeet]

Well, our taxpayer dollars are now going towards creating digital forecasts. Since I am paying for them, Shouldn't I get them for free instead of paying for them twice? If NWS/NOAA is making the raw data into a 'value added product', why should I be locked out?

The analogy doesn't extend. Companies are free to offer duplicate services. The more apt analogy would be: Microsoft owns Windows, Microsoft refuses to sell .NET stuff, except to companies that convinced MS to distribute it in a special format only to them.

Re:Should be free.

[gilroy]

Blockquoth the poster:

Because the government should not compete with the private sector.

So when I start my private army I can get the government to pay me and disband theirs?

Haven't you been reading the news? This is already happening.

Re:Should be free.

[drooling-dog]

Don't forget the most important distinction between the NWS and Accuweather: Only one of them can legally contribute to political campaigns. This, and not any quest for "efficiency," is the real engine behind privatization.

Re:Should be free.

[blakestah]

It might be a simple principle to George Bush.

But there are, currently, dozens and dozens of small weather forecasting niches. People do weather forecasting for hang-gliding, or surfing, or wind-surfing, and do this by interpreting available NWS data.

If the change in enacted, almost all of these small-time forecasters will go away. Anyone who wants weather information will be able to get it, either by paying accuweather, or by writing their own tools to interpret the freely available raw data. I have written tools to decode raw data, and it is not tricky work, but it takes some time.

My viewpoint is that currently, all weather forecasting uses the same models and same data input, those of the military (FNMOC) and NWS. The raw data costs an enormous amount of money to get, and a small amount to provide through current web pages.

The proposal, if enacted, would DECREASE available weather sources, not INCREASE it, and would result in a net DECREASE in the quality and quantity of weather forecasts to the public. The people who would profit will be those who write weather interpreting tools and provide them to others. It is asking for a government handout - plain and simple. Remove a government service, so we can provide it instead.

The key point to keep in mind here is that ALL WEATHER MODELS and ALL FORECASTING MODELS are 100% owned by the government. The cost for development was ENORMOUS and EXTREMELY VALUABLE. Accuweather wants the VISUAL PRESENTATION to be removed, so they can use their own, and sell it, instead. The VISUAL PRESENTATION provides ALL the consumer value.

I think the better analogy would be if the government wrote an operating system and a window manager and browser. Microsoft lobbied the government to remove the window manager only, so they could sell the whole package as their own.

It will have a chilling effect on small niche weather forecasters, cost consumers more to get the same data (or worse), lead to no improvement in forecasting (remember the models will not change), and profit a few large weather companies substantially. Accuweather is just getting pissed off that the internet allows easy access to the same data they've always had easy access to, and it is eating their profit margin.

Re:Should be free.

[JuggleGeek]

Most of the posts also miss the business model. The government collects the raw data, and that is made freely available. What Accuweather and the like do is turn that raw data into value-added products like maps with pretty colors, icons, etc. They translate the science into a form that average people understand.

And I can see where that is a useful service - but if the data the government collects is made available to whoever wants it, instead of one company, then those value-added products can be done by any company that chooses to do them.

I fail to see why Accuweather should be given any kind of monopoly on that data - they didn't collect it, and taxes paid for the collection, not Accuweather.

Re:Should be free.

[jasonditz]

You're confusing money stolen from you being used to pay for something with paying for that something yourself.

If a pickpocket uses money from my wallet to pay for an all-you-can-eat buffet, that doesn't mean I should get to eat there too.

Re:Should be free.

[john82]

From the Commercial Weather Services Association (CWSA) own presentation on this topic:

[NWS Position Statement:] The NWS should make its data and products available in internetaccessible digital form. Information held in digital databases should be based on widely recognized standards, formats, and metadata descriptions to ensure that data from different observing platforms, databases, and models can be integrated and used by all interested parties in the weather and climate enterprise.

CWSA Position Statement: .. CWSA endorses the dissemination of all NWS data and information (including experimental) in real time without delay in Internet accessible digital form to the private sector for distribution to the public in formats that are appropriate to carry out a properly defined NWS mission. The digital database should not be used to allow the NWS to expand beyond its core mission, jeopardize the existing infrastructure, or enter areas creating publicly-funded competition with the Commercial Weather Industry.

Note the first part of the CWSA position. The part where publicly-funded weather information should go directly to the private sector. They'll decide the what, when, how and how much of subesquent dissemination to the public. All data. All formats (even the experimental stuff, we wouldn't want them to miss out on anything tasty). Then the private sector can package it for profit (what you call value-added).

I gather from your argument, that the government should not provide publicly-funded data (not software, cars or some other private venture) to the public? If commercial companies can take raw data, do something productive with it, and sell it, good for them. But there's not a chance in hell that they should be the only ones with access to the data. The public paid for the data at least once already.

Re:Should be free.

[sjames]

Agreed. I am all for Accuweather and others using freely available data to produce forecasts suitable for various consumers. If they are adding substantial value, they will have no problems staying in business.

The fact that they believe freely available data will kill their business model makes me wonder if THEY believe that they add substantial value!

If they're not doing anything that can't be managed by any enthusiastic ameture with an internet connection and a bit of (possibly Free) software, they SHOULD fail. I see no reason they should be granted privileged access to data that the taxpayer paid to collect. Businesses that want to make a profit need to do something someone values. The more it's valued, and the harder it is to do, the more they stand to earn by doing it.

Re:Should be free.

[hyperlinx]

Isn't there E-Gov legislation that is supposed to ensure free access to government information. As a gov't agency, the NWS/NOAA should provide the data to anyone that asks. Maybe i'll start a private company providing accurate time, and put time.gov out of business...Has anyone patented providing time over the internet....there's money to be made here somewhere.

Re:Should be free.

[UnrepentantHarlequin]

Because the government should not compete with the private sector. It's a simple enough principle, if there's something that the private sector is willing to do for-profit, then the government simply should not compete with them.

When Accu-Weather establishes their own network of thousands of automated and manned data collection stations, when they launch their own weather satellites, when they buy some of the world's fastest supercomputers and write global weather modelling software for them, when they set up hundreds of radar stations, and when they get a time machine to gather weather records from a hundred years before the company was founded, then they might have the right to deny information critical to life, safety, and livelihood to anyone other than their paying customers.

But since we, the taxpayers, own all of that, no private company -- not Accu-Weather, not anyone -- has the right to restrict the benefits of those taxpayer-owned resources to themselves.

Accu-Weather was not the first private weather company. If a system such as they want, where some or all data is limited to distribution solely to existing corporations, then Accu-Weather would never have been born. A grad student named Joel Myers wouldn't have had access to the data he needed to start making forecasts for local ski areas, and eventually expand that to a worldwide weather service. Of course, that scenario is exactly in Accu-Weather's best interest. Remember, while it's in our interest, as consumers, to have open competition in any given market and a wide array of choices, it is in the interest of the companies in that market to reduce competition and to raise the highest possible barriers to entry into that market, to protect their own position. That's what this is all about.

Re:Should be free.

[canadian_right]

Bullshit. Private companies should not have a monopoly on information that was collected and processed using taxpayers money. The only thing these private 'weather' companies do is re-distribute publicly funded information.

Now that technology makes is very cheap for the government to distribute this information the NATURAL free market result is that the private weather companies die. They no longer have a valuable service to provide.

If these private weather companies had been the ones investing in weather stations, satelites and super-computers and then the government decided to move in and do the same you might have an argument. But this is not the case. These private weather companies are NOT weather forecasters - they are simply restributing information YOU paid your government to collect.

Re:Should be free.

[Anonymous Coward]

Look, up in the sky. It's a VAX! It's a Cray! It's...it's...

Re:Should be free.

[DoraLives]

Bullshit. Private companies should not have a monopoly on information that was collected and processed using taxpayers money.

Amen, brother!

Below, my own unworthy letter to the NWS regarding the proposed policy, complete with cc's.

As a SERVICE, subsidized by government tax revenue, the NWS should provide all raw and processed data that it generates, to the public for no additional charge above and beyond the original tax revenue that was collected.

Paying for my weather twice, in the form of having to pay commercial services in order to obtain data that was originally collected using MY tax dollars, is a type of double taxation at best and outright theft at worst.

The interests of public safety are best served by the widest dissemination of that data on which decisions can be made. Anyone who is unable to interpret the raw and/or processed data generated by the NWS is free to purchace additionally processed forms of that data from commercial enterprises, either directly, via subscription-based specialty services such as are available at Accuweather and other specialty outlets, or indirectly, via advertiser-sponsored services on the internet, television, radio, etc . No one should be COMPELLED to purchace additionally processed data if they choose not to do so.

Commercial enterprises that advocate any other position can only be doing so in their OWN self interest as opposed to a genuine interest in PUBLIC safety. I find this to be an unacceptable position regarding a SERVICE that is, at its root, founded upon my tax dollar.

If you have any questions or comments regarding the above, please feel free to contact me at your earliest convenience at either my email address of "xxx@xxx.com" or my personal address at xxxxx xxx xxxxxxxxx xxx xx xxxxxxx

Regards,

xxxxx xxxxxxxx

cc:

DL.Johnson@noaa.gov Conrad.C.Lautenbacher@noaa.gov devans@doc.gov myersb@accuweather.com

Re:Should be free.

[weston]

Because the government should not compete with the private sector. It's a simple enough principle, if there's something that the private sector is willing to do for-profit, then the government simply should not compete with them.

Simple enough. So's physics when you neglect friction and a whole host of other things that give you nice, clean models, easy to work with, but limited to just a few kinds of real world problems.

And that's to say nothing of the fact that you've really made a strong normative statement without any objective statement behind it. You can (though you didn't) definitely argue that there's an inefficiency introduced into a system where a private entity is providing a set of services also offered by a public agency. Whether those inefficiencies offset the positives of continuing the public service can be an entirely different story.

Your argument that they don't hold the entire system so they shouldn't hold any of it doesn't make sense. Otherwise the analogy could be extended like this: Microsoft owns Windows, so other complanies shouldn't write software for it. Apple owns the OS AND the hardware, so other companies shouldn't write software for it.

The argument is actually much more like a trucking company complaining that other people drive on public roads for free.

Or, to take either of your arguments -- it would be like a gaming company that uses Windows or the Mac OS as a dev platform complainging to Microsoft or Apple that *other people* are developing games on the platform too, using the same cheaply/freely available tools they are!

In an obscure but related story....

[like-it-or-not]

In an obscure but related story, Barry Myers admits he has received non-trivial amounts of business advice and financial assistance from the RIAA.

Re:In an obscure but related story....

[JamesTRexx]

Kinda obvious where he stands seeing it's an MS Word doc instead of an open format. :-P

Re:In an obscure but related story....

[Anonymous Coward]

MODS:
Why is this marked "off-topic"?
If you're not going to RTFA and, thus, not know who is Barry Myers, you have

• NO

business modding!
The poster made a slightly funny joke, but it was not off-topic.

PC weather tools

[dj245]

Barry Myers (MS Word doc), president of Accuweather wants you to have pay before using Kweather and other similar tools.

Are there any good non-adware PC weather tools? Being a true geek, I sometimes don't look out a window for days at a time. Besides the infamous Weatherbug, what else is there?

Re:PC weather tools

[Yaa 101]

Yes there is,

The weather module of GKrellM. http://web.wt.net/~billw/gkrellm/gkrellm.html

btw. could those stealing middlemen stop nagging that their stealing businessmodel stops working.
If they had setup devices of their own and had financed all self instead of piggybacking on the Government weather services that are paid by us, not them.

Re:PC weather tools

[Jacer]

If you use trillian there are several plugins available. But being a plug in, it requires trillian pro. I'd recommend paying for it though, as it is a good app, and the staff is pretty prompt about patches whenever a gateway protocol changes.

Re:PC weather tools

[Dacotah]

I use Weather Watcher from http://www.singerscreations.com/. Adware free and Spyware free, the total download is just 1.48Mb and is freeware. I liked it so much I gave him a donation. It is somewhat like Weatherbug without all the bloat and crap. KWeather for KDE would be similiar to Wx Watcher.

Re:PC weather tools

[kalpol]

Try Weather Pulse.

Re:PC weather tools

[melankolik]

Personally, I've recently installed the free version of Stardock's Desktop X, using one of the many weather objects available at WinCustomize.

So far, I've gotten alot out of it, and there are alot of other useful and sleek looking objects (plugins) and themes available, if that's your sort of thing. Just some minimalist weather reports and system stats, for me, though.

Re:PC weather tools

[fiori]

Weather watcher (Windows only) from http://www.singerscreations.com/

Re:PC weather tools

[Troy]

I've had excellent success with Weather Watcher. It sits in the toolbar showing the temperature, has a large number of handy display options, has a common sense radar map system, uses a beautiful forecast layout, can show the radar as your desktop background, and pops up any severe weather alerts. His update software sometimes botches and requires a complete program reinstall, but outside of that minor glitch, it is a top notch program that I run on all of my Windows boxes.

-Troy

Re:PC weather tools

[innocent_white_lamb]

Are there any good non-adware PC weather tools?

The gnome gweather desktop applet.

Re:PC weather tools

[JPGumby]

Weather Watcher is screen scraping weather.com's information. It does not use any NWS data. Now, If I could get a nice acting tool that uses NWS METAR for the PC, I'd be touting it.

Ha ha. Teh funny!

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh wait, it's not. I lied!

The Solomon solution...

[Genda]

This is so simple... Either the weather information we pay for through our taxes is provoded to the public for free... or Accuweather can foot the entire bill for weather collection and charge whatever it see's as a fair market price for the service. I would just as happily see my tax dollars returned to me, and watch the weather on the evening news, or buy a small personal weather station.

Genda

Re:The Solomon solution...

[Anonymous Coward]

The evening news gets its weather from the National Weather Service more often than not. Check out the site at nws.noaa.gov and see whats there, this site is on my daily checks list and is quite useful (not to mention accurate). The system is in place, why not use it and not re-invent the wheel.

Re:The Solomon solution...

[bdptcob]

Or go outside...

Re:The Solomon solution...

[Anonymous Coward]

You're naive if you think that they would return the money to you. All they would say is, "Oh look, our budget has increased by x dollars, let's give ourselves a raise for being such good money managers."

Re:The Solomon solution...

[gnu-generation-one]

Aside from the "we've paid for the data" argument (Ordnance Survey are thieves of our taxpayer-funded mapping), you can see some weather arriving by getting xplanet to download a cloud map (thankyou university of aberdeen and meteosat, for providing that), and have the current cloud image overlaid on maps as your deskop background.

Bad idea.

[Minstrel Boy]

Here's what happens when you don't have good international cooperation for your weather service: http://www.1900storm.com/ KeS

Re:Bad idea.

[howhardcanitbetocrea]

How much worse can weather get than when it is raining error 404s?

Free Weather Could Save Lives

[miyako]

I think having free weather information is not only a good thing, it could save lives. I live in the midwest, where for a few months a year (tornado season), you can really be taking your ass in your hands if you don't keep up with the weather. I'm sure it's the same in other regions of the country with various other weather patterns (hurricanes in the south-east, snow storms in the north and north east).
I don't own a TV to be able to watch the weather on the local news, (thought I do have a weather radio), and for people like me, it can really be a good thing to have forwarning.
All that aside, this guy sounds like a real asshat because, while I could understand if the companies were doing any work, them wanting to make money, his complaint seems to be "Hey, don't just publish this information in a way anyone can get it for free, obfuscate it first so that we have a product to sell."
Of course, if all else fails you can easily tell the weather with just a rock and a string. First tie the rock to the string then hang it outside from a tree branch. When you want to know what the weather is outside, just look at the rock. If the rock is wet it's raining, if the rock is white it's snowing, if the rock is easy to see it's sunny, if the rock is hard to see it's cloudy. If the string is not perpendicular to the tree branch, it's windy. And if the rock is missing, tornado.

Re:Free Weather Could Save Lives

[Anonymous Coward]

If this new ruling goes through, and you cannot recieve free information, and this results in any preventable damage to you (heck, your dog was swept up in a tornado!), then I suggest you follow the good ole American way: find a lawyer and sue Accuweather. The theory of the case would be "If they have arranged to be the sole distributor of weather information, and it wasn't delivered in a timely manner, and this resulted in the loss of your dog; they should pay..." including those wonderful psychological damages, which are impossible to estimate and pay big.

Maybe that'll teach 'em, yo?

Re:Free Weather Could Save Lives

[Anonymous Coward]

... and if the tree is missing ...

alternatives...

[brokenspark]

Well ok, you don't want me using weather.gov data. So I am going to write a little script that grabs the data from accuweather.com, what you dont like that? Then f*ck off.

Do it ourselves, for ourselves

[CdBee]

It's my understanding that weather-satellite transmissions aren't encrypted and can be picked up by anyone, this certainly used to be the case.

So, write a Distributed Computing Client which downloads weather-satellite data from a handful of sat-dish-connected servers and predicts the weather. You'd need a great many clients doing the basic data-processing and a lot of higher-level nodes which collate the information, but in theory you could use weather satellites from all over the globe instead of just the ones your domestic weather service relies on... and probably build a bigger picture of the weather-system.

We slashdotters always say Data should be free, how could it be more free than if we generate it ourselves?

Re:Do it ourselves, for ourselves

[log2.0]

hmm, if there was a lot of processing power required for this, im sure some of us would lend our CPU cycles seti@home style :)

Re:Do it ourselves, for ourselves

[kalidasa]

What makes you think weather satellite transmissions would remain unencrypted if the weather industry lobbyists succeed in preventing the NWS from providing direct free weather information over the internet? These folks have built their industry out of packaging and distributing free government data, and now that new technologies have made distribution cheap enough for the government to provide the data directly to the taxpayer, they realize the free ride is over. So do they decide to offer new value-added services to maintain their audience? No, they want to surpress the competition.

Always keep this in mind when you think about free markets: free markets are the result of an equilibrium of self-interest. No company in a market acts in the best interests of the market - their urge is always to attempt to limit the market to serve only their own interests. When each competitor's interests serve to cancel out the interests of other competitors, free markets are self-correcting and flourish. But when limiting the market is in the best interests of ALL existing competitors, those competitors will act in cooperation to suppress the free market. That's why free markets don't work in a true anarchy - because in an absolutely free market the common interest of all factors in an industry will lead to the development of a cartel, and competition will tend to be limited to a stable equilibrium (until one competitor gains an advantage that allows them to wipe out the rest of the cartel and establish a monopoly).

Re:Do it ourselves, for ourselves

[Lumpy]

yup. I recieve the images from NOAA-17 all the time.

makes it great for when you are camping and need to know upcoming cloud patterns heading your way and you dont have net access.

there are many more NOAA sattelites, but NOAA-17 is the newest and can be easily recieved on a handheld reciever without any trouble.

Re:Do it ourselves, for ourselves

[Corydon76]

What makes you think weather satellite transmissions would remain unencrypted if the weather industry lobbyists succeed in preventing the NWS from providing direct free weather information over the internet?

Because upgrading satellite firmware is not just something you do casually. Not to mention that it would break every existing application out there, which means all the private companies would need to rewrite their applications to use the new format, which is definitely not in their financial interest.

The argument here is not for changing the format to a private encrypted stream; it's for not changing the format at all (something the NWS wants to do to enable more people to read their data).

Re:Do it ourselves, for ourselves

[ColdWetDog]

What makes you think weather satellite transmissions would remain unencrypted

Well, for one, the fact that the sats are up there and downlink data not easily changed. A lot of them are years old and I would be really surpised if they had the capability of changing the sats software to be able to encrypt it.

Recall also that indeed you can that data downloaded by yourself. Either by marine or amateur radio weather fax systems. (The obligatory google sites are left as an exercise for the student). Several years ago I fiddled with this - pretty easy to do and kinda fun to get the data raw off the bird. Now, given age, sloth and the internet I just link to the NWS sat feeds. I'd really hate to go back but it's certainly possible. Not sure that everyone on the block has the ability to do so.

And, since I live in rural Alaska that likely doesn't have enough potential customers to make generation of the data economically worthwhile, does that mean I wouldn't have any weather??? Hey, that could work. Pay up or we'll really give you some weather....

Re:Do it ourselves, for ourselves

[dkf]

hmm, if there was a lot of processing power required for this, im sure some of us would lend our CPU cycles seti@home style :)

Short Version: That's unlikely to work well for technical reasons.

Longer Version: Weather predictions are done by having a large weather model (basically a massive simulation) that you seed with the current observations and then run forward for however many hours that you are interested in. Then you look at the results, add in effects of local topology (like cities and mountains), and try to work out what's going on from that. There has even been work on doing this sort of thing on the Grid.

But it doesn't work well as a highly distributed application. The problem is that this type of problem is much more highly coupled; effects in one part of the simulation tend to spread (which is kind-of obvious when you think about it!) Although you could use (what is in effect) a distributed cluster to do the computation, the communications costs would ensure that your performance would be absolutely shite, and adding more computers would not help. You'd be drowning in a sea of messages instead of doing real work. (The same is true for other kinds of fluid dynamics apps, btw.)

It's this sort of thing where supercomputers really come into their own. Those machines have disgustingly expensive architectures but they don't really have much competition. But if you want to build one, better start thinking about how you are going to provide space to house them, electricity to power them, and AC to keep them cool. As well as the obvious stuff like high performance networking, massive disk arrays, etc. :^)

Won't Happen

[artlu]

The NWS is pretty hardup for cash right now in order to waste money on developing Internet standards. This is probably a vapor article, which won't effect any of our little applications anyway. I use "WeatherPop" for the mac. It sits in the menu bar real nice and does not annoy me, which is the most important factor ;).

GroupShares Inc. - A Free Online Investment Community

Re:Won't Happen

[gilroy]

Blockquoth the poster:

The NWS is pretty hardup for cash right now in order to waste money on developing Internet standards.

That is exactly the most dangerous time -- when the agency is tempted to sell its soul for private money to keep going. Look how wonderful things got at the USPTO when Congress stripped them of their income...

This is probably a vapor article, which won't effect any of our little applications anyway.

If the data formats are changed and the specs not made open, then for sure your little app will crash. It's not clear to me if they're really talking about making the data inaccessible -- but if that's the thrust, then we should be up in arms.

Re:Won't Happen

[1hurcoman]

It will never happen, my free Weatherbug program will always run, and think of all the great savings I get with all 10 of the search bars it installed with it.

Re:Won't Happen

[Anonymous Coward]

weathercast pwns weatherbug

it's got awesome popups too. so when I go to a web site, it shows me about all these other products that I should buy!1!

I luvs me mah internet ads

Stop setting up strawmen.

[Anonymous Coward]

Private companies from all over the world can cooperate just like bureacratic, inefficient government agencies.

Besides, your link gives a 404.

Re:Stop setting up strawmen.

[Minstrel Boy]

Darned formatting.

http://www.1900storm.com

It's not a straw man argument. That was the greatest natural disaster (loss of life) in US history, and a significant contributing factor was that the fledgling US Weather Service didn't want to listen to the Cuban weather reports. Privatized weather companies may or may not be more willing to work and play together, but they certainly haven't shown the willingness to invest in the necessary infrastructure. Plus, in many countries private weather companies may *not* be able to cooperate, by government fiat.

Less government is generally better, but national infrastructure like weather services are a notable exception.

KeS

Re:Stop setting up strawmen.

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, most people grow out of dogmatic libertarianism soon after moving out of their parents' homes.

Re:Stop setting up strawmen.

[Anonymous Coward]

US Weather Service didn't want to listen to the Cuban weather reports

so basically you're saying we need the NWS because of how the NWS completely fucked up 104 years ago?

Do your own Weather forcast...

[Anonymous Coward]

Why use web based Weather feeds when you can pick the data off the satellite's directly???

Connect a 137-138MHz FM communications receiver or scanner to your soundcard and get colour images directly from overhead weather satellites. You can either build your own like I did or just buy a receiver.

For an explanation try:
http://www.emgola.cz/www_fa/meteosat_englisc h_how. html

and for a great tool: http://www.wxtoimg.com

Re:Do your own Weather forcast...

[fastdecade]

Why use web based Weather feeds when you can pick the data off the satellite's directly??

Maybe it's just me, but I could think of so many answers to that question.

Re:Do your own Weather forcast...

[Baricom]

Why use web based Weather feeds when you can pick the data off the satellite's directly???

Because while not everybody has the money to build or buy a radio, almost everybody has access to a web browser with no additional costs.

Re:Do your own Weather forcast...

[TheGavster]

We used to do that at my school, and from what I remember it involved a 9 foot dish to pick up the signals. We made a decent bit of money getting the signal and bouncing it off a rented satellite transponder so that people could pick it up with 18" dishes, because the 9 footers were such a pain to mount. The weather images are really absurdly detailed though ...

Middlemen

[The Tyro]

Sounds to me as if these companies want the government to sanction their status as middleman brokers of weather information, all at the public's expense.

Sorry, but I don't agree. If I'm not mistaken, the NWS exists on public funds; the info should be public also.

Besides, weather can make an actual life-and-death difference in some scenarios... just ask any sailor or pilot. Also, how about tornado warnings and such... will you have to pay to get those as well? I'd like to see them try to extract payment for such life-saving info, and watch the avalance of negative public outcry... you'd be more popular if you kicked a puppy.

Re:Middlemen

[benstrange]

"In order to protect the competitive nature of the privately-owned media, direct NWS participation with the radio and television media should be limited to those situations requiring urgent public action as in the case of severe or extreme weather and flooding or education and preparedness activities." [Proposed for repeal by the NWS].

I assume this means the NWS is allowed to tell people about impending doom, but nothing else. It follows, I suppose, that the proposed for repeal bit means they want to be allowed to tell people more than this. I have to admit I don't really understand the situation, not being in the US.

Besides, much simpler in England. If it's not already raining, it soon will be. Prepare accordingly.

Re:Middlemen

[cluckshot]

I made an observation about the weather and its importance to daily life around the world one day when I tried to discuss the weather with the locals in the Philippines. (EH?) was the response. It never occurred to them that paying much attention to the weather was important.

They get weather there and some times quite severe, but I found that the reason was simple. They knew that certain days of the year it would be dry others wet and stormy. If the wind was blowing a certain direction at a certain time of the year, it told them what the weather was.

I suppose this is an over simplification but simply stated most of the world gets weather by the calender and by location. Weather in most of the world is pretty much boring. NORTH AMERICA and most specifically the Central Mississippi River Valley gets some pretty amazing weather. It is neither predictable by time of the year nor is it something that you can know by location. You cannot know it by wind direction and you cannot know it by other current conditions. It can bet amazingly dangerous or troublesome.

Rain in this region of the USA and southern Canada can be accompanied by most dangerous condtions. Rain in this area rains Fertilizer as well (Nitrate) which is natural in origin. As such weather is to those of us living in that area a pretty important thing. To the rest of the human race, they have a hard time understanding our preoccupation with it.

The logic of allowing US Government Weather Forcasting to be open to the public is an American Construct. It stems from our understanding that WE own our government. This is counter to the logic for most of the rest of the world. We are despite accusations to the contrary an Anti-Colonial force. The Colonial forces want to reoccupy our land and they are attempting to upset the logic so that they can force the middle men into weather just as they do in Europe and Asia. They are attempting to make everything even that which we have already bought and paid for into property we have to pay rent on. This is what the discussion is about.

The NWS for basic Info has a lot more to add to the forecast stuff than you might think. If you want to see my current conditions here they are. Clicking on the side links can give you a hint of the level of data that we expect for free.

Re:Middlemen

[david614]

I agree with your points about severe weather in North America. It is not true, however, that government owned weather forecasting is a particularly American construct. The UK, Canada, France, Germany and many other countries all provide weather information to their publics. Much of this information is also readily available on the public internet. One characteristic that is fairly unique to the U.S., however, is the existence of a large private sector weather information industry. It is that industry that wants to narrow the government-supplied information services available -- at tax payer expense -- to the public. It is quite clear why they want to do this -- they want to secure their market positions. I think that the choice between these two arguments -- public data dissemination using open standards, with selective provision of value-added "data products", and purely market oriented capture of economic rents created from raw data paid for by the public -- is obvious. Accuweather and its industry partners should be free to exploit whatever niches they can develop. Other uses, most importantly governmental users in the first-responder (fire, police, EMTs), etc. should not be hostage to the profit concerns of private data providers either. There is also the issue of potential open source-based value-added weather analytical services. These other potential options should not be disabled because of the narrow economic interests of a small group of private corporations.

Re:Middlemen

[LiMikeTnux]

Besides, much simpler in England. If it's not already raining, it soon will be. Prepare accordingly.

Yeah but in chicago its alot more complex...if you don't like the weather (or, unfortunately, if you do) wait 5 minutes and it will change

Pointless

[Enlarge Your Penis]

The government collects weather data anyway-it has to, for shipping, flights, disaster prediction, military uses etc. If the taxpayer's already paying for it, why shouldn't they get it for free on the internet?

why?

[grahagre]

man, can't the gov't just fuck off and keep the internet an internationalized space where for once the united states isn't the dominant player. don't mind me, whenever i hear about the internet becoming regulated i get pissed off. weather is weather; nuff' said.

give me a -1 and i'll blow you a new asshole, moderators. i should know i am one. ;-P

Re:why?

[grahagre]

i was drunk when i posted this.

It's life or death

[ewe2]

Good weather data is frequently a matter of life or death in many fields, it's that simple. Restriction for commercial gain cannot be sanctioned by any government that desires to avoid the pitchforks of public fury.

In case this doesn't seem odd to you, consider your insurance options if forecast trends become a matter of "commercial in confidence" and you didn't prepare for that sudden storm, to name one example. Or, if you're a private pilot, perhaps an ultralight enthusiast, consider the expense of your hobby if you have to pay extra to make damn sure you know the density altitude at that cross-country airport. Do farmers really need another expense to add to their list to make a harvest successful?

Don't let this get a foothold, noone can afford the price.

Re:Should we have to pay twice to get weather fore

[BadDoggie]

don't understand how anyone is paying "twice". Please explain?

The National Weather Service, a part of NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), is funded by taxes. It's already been paid for. The need for accurate weather information is extremely important for the military. Because it's almost as important for civilian use, the information is made available to the public.

Pilots, farmers, businesses and municipalities need this weather information, and in the U.S., weather is almost an obsession (Weather Channel, anyone?) There is no national or continental weather service in Europe; private pilots have to pay for information, usually in the form of two daily faxes. This means that European pilots have to know even more about weather than their American counterparts because they must be able to predict conditions, whereas U.S. pilots can get up-to-the-minute information.

In a nutshell, the Private Weather Sector want to be a middleman, themselves continuing to get the information for free and then charging others for what they (the public) have already paid for.

• Pay government (taxes) for weather information.
• Only one private group has access to this information
• Pay private group to give you this information

Neat, huh?

If you still don't see it, imagine "EduCorp". EduCorp cuts a deal with the local government to provide schooling for children. The locality stil pays for everything, but EduCorp acts as a middleman. Only EduCorp subscribers can send their kids to these public schools. You pay taxes for schools and then pay EuCorp for th right to send your kids there. All clear?

Australia went down this path.... OS won :-)

[B747SP]

The Austraian Bureau of Meteorology had this little dilemma with it's Weather RADAR product several years ago. They apparently had a very small number (as in less than 20) of customers who paid rather a lot of money for access to the service. Someone wised up and figured out that the cost of collecting the money from such a small customer base wasn't cost effective, so they opened the product to all and sundry.

It's a really really useful tool. I use it at least a couple of times a week - basically anytime the weather seems a bit sus and I need to decide if to do a bolt from the office on my bike before a storm front hits, or to wait until it passes. The last four images thing lets you get a feel for which way the weather is blowing, etc, etc.

On Tuesday nights, when the Sydney Knights do their Tuesday Night Ride (TNR), we're all hitting the bom.gov.au site to see what the weather is looking like. If you ride a motorcycle and live in Sydney, Australia then you need to come on a TNR!.

Now Australia didn't seem to have the problem with the commercial weather services wanting to continue to charge customers for something that they already paid the government for... that's a whole new ball game. Still, I'm all for the gummint opening up public access to weather data in any jurisdiction - it's a really really really good thing. Let the snake oil sellers find a new flavour of snake oil - I've heard that the penis enlargement pill market is a good one.

Re:Australia went down this path.... OS won :-)

[MEGAMAID]

That site is thee BOM
har har, my side...

I'm a sailor and the BOM site saves lives and helps keep people out of trouble. I can see the positives for charging for a weather service, it might let them spend more on improving services etc etc. But there are many negatives:

1. This information is used for saftey reasons. Price on a life anyone....
2. Lots of people use the information and it is of different value to each. How do you set charges on it
3. We've already paid for someone to get the information. Why do we have to pay again to see it?

Re:Australia went down this path.... OS won :-)

[Brandybuck]

Price on a life anyone....

Answer: I don't know, but I can assure you that it's finite. If you want to know the exact price, ask your insurance agent...

The point is, you cannot use an argument that life is infinitely precious, because it's simply not true. If it was you would never get out on a ship, because there is a small but finite probability that you will drown and lose your infinitely precious life.

Do you ban peanut butter because someone might have a deadly peanut allergy and not know it until it's too late?

That doesn't work in Office XP

[lonesome phreak]

"Providing me with a carbon copy I will take it as both notification that you have sent the letter and your consent to circulate copies as might be appropriate. If you click at the end of each email address above and press the space bar, they should activate as a link."

Um, that does nothing but put a space in the hyperlink. You have to hold down ctrl then click. Opps.

Look here for a list of NWS contacts: http://www.stormready.noaa.gov/contact.htm. It has a name, address, phone and email for each office.

My reply:

From: busted
Email: myersb@accuweather.com
"An anonymous reader writes "The National Weather Service wants to update a 1991 policy that limits what data it can put on the Internet. The proposed new policy makes putting free data on the Internet official. The Private Weather Sector wants NWS to provide its new digital forecasts only in specialized data formats and would like NWS to shut down new XML data feeds. Barry Myers (MS Word doc), president of Accuweather wants you to have pay before using Kweather and other similar tools. Myers is asking friends to comment against the new NWS policy by June 30. Should we have to pay twice to get weather forecasts?""

Re:That doesn't work in Office XP

[Barbarian]

pressing space works in Office 2000, I guess they changed the feature.

To: fairweather@noaa.gov
CC: myersb@accuweather.com
"I am in favor of open-to-all weather data, on the internet, in standard formats such as XML. I am for the new proposed NWS policy, and I am against the position of Accuweather's president Barry Myers. But who cares, I'm just a citizen."

don't forget to send it to the official comments address in addition to cc'ing Mr. Friendly.

National Weather Service funding...

[hadesan]

We the people, pay for the National Weather Service in the form of our tax dollars (2003 $800M, 2004 $824M). "The National Weather Service provides weather, hydrologic and climate forecasts and warnings for the United States, its territories, adjacent waters and oceans." (blurb ripped from Washington Technology.com)

I see no reason that we should have to pay for Accuweather to make a pretty graphic or the like. By opening up the data on the Internet you provide researchers, hobbyists, and tinkerers with a means to get up-to-date and accurate weather information easily as well as historical data.

NWS also talks about their Information Quality guidelines here - detailing their information and what is available.

Who knows maybe someone will develop a Weather@Home model which runs on the same principle as SETI@Home. It would be pretty cool to start doing climate models outside of the governments and universties Research labs...

Re:National Weather Service funding...

[surprise_audit]

Who knows maybe someone will develop a Weather@Home model which runs on the same principle as SETI@Home.

You mean,like these guys?

http://www.climateprediction.net/index.php

What is climateprediction.net? Climateprediction.net is the largest experiment to try and produce a forecast of the climate in the 21st century. To do this, we need people around the world to give us time on their computers - time when they have their computers switched on, but are not using them to their full capacity.

Re:National Weather Service funding...

[gr8_phk]

Oh THAT project. And when the model has been refined by all those peoples computers, they will commercialize it - probably license it to Accuweather.

Re:National Weather Service funding...

[david614]

Of courese, it would be great if they had an active (not beta) open source client for the project.

.doc as html

[dncsky1530]

for those who dont feel like viewing the .doc file, heres the html version

Better service needed

[unoengborg]

As long as I can't order the weather I like where I am from these weather service companies its not worth paying for.

Free?

[Anonymous Coward]

Should be careful about calling it a "free service". As has already been said countless times in this discussion the NWS is paid for by the tax payers with the intent serving those people. If we simply use the phrase "pre-paid service" the discussion shouldn't have any merit.

Then again comercial internet providers have claimed in court that municipal internet providers should banned because they make it harder to profiteer off those communities.

"Hidden" Microsoft Word Document Info

[Anonymous Coward]

This is from BARRYMYERS-AMS-031804.doc:

Author: Tammy Zanghi
Company: AccuWeather, Inc.
Email subject: AMS Corporate Forum Presentation
Author email: myersb@accuweather.com
Author email display name: Barry Myers

Well, I'd pay...

[hussar]

...if there was a proven increase in the level of accuracy of the forecasts.

If the Private Weather Service is just repackaging NWS information, then I would prefer an open source app that downloads and collates the NWS XML feed.

But, if I pay for a premium service, and then you ask me what the weather is going to be like, do I violate the EULA when I tell you to take an umbrella?

.doc as other

[Zapper]

For those of you who don't have the proprietary .doc viewer, there's another one here. ;-)

Yes!

[Kludge]

The private industry will make our weather service better, just like Microsoft makes computing so great!

Re:Yes!

[CA_Jim]

In Microsoft's defense, they at least created new products (Word, Excel, Access) that did not exist and add features and improvements.

The analogy would be closer to new "command line" word (rebundled VI), charging you for it, even tough both you and they could get the source free from sourceforge.

Re:Yes!

[UnrepentantHarlequin]

In Microsoft's defense, they at least created new products (Word, Excel, Access) that did not exist...

Um ... you think that word processors, spreadsheets, and databases originated with Microsoft?

Just what exactly were people using back in the Apple II days, then? I have some remarkable memories ... I guess they were hallucinations ... I seem to remember things like VisiCalc, VisiFile, etc., back around 1980, over a year before the IBM PC even existed, and long before anyone noticed an obscure little company called Microsoft.

Innovation? Let's go back a ways ... Microsoft didn't write MS-DOS; they bought a system called QDOS and renamed it. QDOS, in turn, wasn't all that original; it had a lot in common (not sure if at the source level) with CP/M, the most popular OS at the time. CP/M, in turn, wasn't very original either -- it was basically a microcomputer port of TOPS-10, though somewhat less user-hostile, or at least user-annoying. (anyone who remembers PIP, report to the old geeks' home immediately!)

No matter what their PR flaks say, Microsoft has never been about innovation. They're all about finding other people's innovation, buying it, copying it, or stealing it (Stacker, anyone?), and bundling it into their own products. Whether or not this may create value is another flamewar entirely ... but Microsoft does not, and never has "created new products." That's not their business model.

A copy & paste comment

[Kludge]

How about someone give us a rational, educated that comment we can copy and paste into the comment web page that supports this new proposal?

Re:A copy & paste comment

[Teancum]

Please don't do this. What is needed is for individuals to really study the issue, show that you have more than one or two brain cells, and intelligently explain why you may support/not support the new policy changes, and potentially suggest new directions to look at with this.

There are many very intelligent individuals here on /. of a very diverse background. What is needed here is not raw activism of the typical D.C. type, but rather people from outside the "weather" industry that can thoughtfully explain how data should not be kept locked up by private companies but needs to be kept free.

There seems to be a kneejerk reaction here with the /. crowd thinking NOAA is going to close up the electronic data products and make them only available to private industry for a high per user cost (like much else in the computer industry from stock quotes to mapping data). The truth is that I don't see any of this sort of thing going on, but rather some very hard working people in a low profit-margin business (even the most profitable companies don't really make that much money off of weather related products, and there is quite a bit of competition, not to mention relatively low barriers to entry, particularly compared to other industries). They are asking for legitimate debate, so study the facts first.

Honestly, I don't know what the issue is about specialized data formats other than XML. XML has its uses, but it is not necessarily the best data format for every situation. If you are a software developer worth anything, you should be able to take data in any binary data format, even if encrypted, and be able to pull all of the data out of that data format. XML is only one way to provide that data.

I will say that in addition to having much of the weather data collecting/processing being done at taxpayer expense, much of the weather data collection is done through a system that is largly volunteers. If you are interested in monitoring weather conditions, particularly if you live in a largely rural area (although urban areas can be of interest as well... it is just that there are many more people per sq. mile), you can volunteer to set up a weather station in your backyard and send the weather data to NOAA. Depending on the equipment you are willing to purchase, you can measure just about any atmospheric information that you can imagine, from pollution levels to current temperature and rainfall levels. Every data point that gives more detailed information helps to make the forecasting models more accurate. Sometimes NOAA will provide equipment, but you don't have wait for them to get it to you if you really want to volunteer and do this yourself (it just takes you own money if you go that route.) This is a stealthy Seti@Home like data project that has been going on for over 100 years, which is why you don't hear too much about it.

Some commercial enterprises (particularly local radio and television stations, as well as a few private airports, seaports, and trucking companies) have their own weather stations that even by themselves could provide a local forecast, but there is a data sharing agreement between everybody involved (even competing TV stations, for example) to share weather related data. Obviously this can be a very bandwidth intensive operation if you really think about all of the information that can be collected. Who pays for this bandwidth? There is nothing in the current proposals that would stop a distributed P2P weather data group from forming, and indeed it would probabaly be encouraged if you could come up with a good system. Really. The commercial weather guys would love it on many levels.

DISCLAIMER: I am not currently in the commercial weather industry. I had to help a couple of companies that were in the commerical weather industry to interface their products with some stuff that I was helping to develop, so I got a pretty good glimpse at some of the stuff they are developing, and some of the issues they d

Well, let's do what he says!

[Chris Mattern]

I think we *definitely* need to follow Mr. Myers advice and send our comments to the email addresses he gives. Oh, and be sure to cc: him. He did ask, after all...

Chris Mattern

No thank you

[jesterzog]

So, write a Distributed Computing Client which downloads weather-satellite data from a handful of sat-dish-connected servers and predicts the weather.

I don't think so. If it were that easy then you could guarantee that it'd be being done already. You could argue for a distributed client and in some way it might be useful. But more of a priority should be figuring out how to design a system that's actually intelligent enough both to make reliable predictions and trustworthy judgement calls about the weather in the first place.

Maybe it's different where you are, but in my location (New Zealand, which is admittedly not the US at all), having weather data and being able to make useful forecasts from it are two very different things. (To be fair, it is quite turbulent and changeable weather over here for a variety of geographical reasons.)

If your local environment means that 90% of days are identical to the day before, then simply having some data might be useful.... if for no other reason than to predict a possible change of some sort probably approching. But if that's your local situation, you probably don't really need satellite data in the first place --- you could use a telephone. The reason that we have meteorologists is because it does require some education and experience to look at the maps and understand properly what's actually happening, what's likely to happen, and (just as importantly) what we still don't know.

Re:No thank you

[Ignignot]

Not to mention the computing power necessary to perform good weather predictions. Earth simulator (#1 on the supercomputing list) predicts the weather. The source code for some of the forecast techniques is available for free, if I recall correctly. I looked into it once and it was a nightmare. And in reality the Accuweather guys don't have a leg to stand on because the MRF (medium range forecast) is about as good as they are, and free, and not provided in an excel sheet.

Pay for weather? Pshaw!

[Fredge]

Should we have to pay twice to get weather forecasts?

[sarcasm]No, we should pay 5 times![/sarcasm]

The last time I seriously counted on weather.com for a 'prediction' it turned out totally wrong and I got rained on. I can't think of many other industries where I would still have a job if I were wrong as often as the weather forecasters are. (Insert Microsoft jab here)

This "Business Model" Already Exist

[aroobie]

We pay for the IRS but can't do business with it on the Internet without paying a third party. This letter is simply wanting the same setup for weather companies that already exist for tax software companies. Just as a side note, I work with a good bit of weather software and I can assure you that the only data we get for free, from any source, are radar images that our doppler radar provides. Since all commercial users (I know of) already pay, this sounds like Accuweather wants individual user's cash. I have seen demos of all the major commercial weather software withiin the last 3 months (looking to upgrade our current software) including Accuweather and this may be a last ditch effort for Accuweather. Other weather software companies are showing advanced modeling, data presentation, and other features as the sellling point not what they can charge for the raw data. At least two other weather software companies did not even care where you got the raw data. I have seen one that actually used the xml data from NWS and used the no data charge as a selling point.

I agree with others here, i.e. Personal use of NWS data have already been paid for and should not fall into the IRS/3rd party software business model.

Re:This "Business Model" Already Exist

[pommiekiwifruit]

You have to go through a third party to file taxes? Sheesh, the UK tax office has had a big push trying to get people to do electronic filing. Or are you talking about having to use an ISP?

Re:This "Business Model" Already Exist

[user no. 590291]

Absolutely! The cozy relationship the IRS has with tax preparation software and service vendors is an outrage that should not be allowed to be repeated with the National Weather Service.

Re:This "Business Model" Already Exist

[Fear the Clam]

You don't have to go through a third party to file taxes. However, the IRS does "encourage" people to file electronically.

The problem is, this requires either (a) buying tax software which includes this feature, (b) paying for a tax service which has their feature in their store, or (c) re-typing everything from your completed federal tax forms into an online form of some third-party company that you've never heard of that may or may not be free, depending on how much you've earned that year. Oh yeah, and the site requires that you use Internet Explorer.

Considering that I (a) do my taxes by hand and would have to enter my nine pages of forms and (b) owe the government money come tax time, so I'm no in a rush for a refund, I just send it snail mail.

I know it's less efficient to have the IRS do the data entry themselves -- a college friend of mine once had a temp job removing staples for the IRS -- but until the IRS makes it worth my while to file electronically, I'm not going out of my way for their convenience.

This is similar to the toll road transponders for cars. In the northeastern USA, there's a common system called EZ-Pass or SpeedPass. You can drive from PA to NH without stopping to pay a toll, which really eases toll plaza congestion. When they first came to MA, you had to pay for the transponder ($25). They even had some sleazy deal with a bank so you'd get a transponder if you opened an account with them. People stayed away in droves.

NY state, on the other hand, wanted to encourage people to use them, so they gave away the transponder and a toll discount to anyone using them on NYC bridges and tunnels. People were interested and scooped 'em up. (I live in Boston, but I got my transponder from NY state.)

If the IRS wants to get serious about people filing electronically, they need to make it worthwhile. Knock a few bucks off the taxes, provide their own software, something like that.

Re:This "Business Model" Already Exist

[GPSguy]

There *are* sources of data beyond radar images...

The reason a lot of commercial enterprises pay for commercial weather data is to get the specialized products and service they want. A large corporate flight department might contract with Universal Wx for individualized forecast services for its pilots on-demand. A farmer might contract for evapotranspiration data for his region to support irrigation requirements. The list goes on.

NWS doesn't have a lot of folks to do the heavy lifting in the Weather Forecast Offices, nor, for that matter, in the Region HQs. It's become a much more lean organization than it used to be.

And, NO, I don't work for NWS. I have a fair bit of interaction, with the guys in the trenches, but I'm not in the Government's employ.

The Fair Weather policy strikes me as one of the most rational pieces of information to come out of NWS HQ in a long time. It reflects a better understanding of the capabilities of the Internet to disseminate timely information, than I've seen expressed in Silver Spring, MD, in a long time.

The Commercial Weather enterprises will survive. They probably will maintain their customer bases, assuming some new upstart doesn't come up and snag customers the old fashioned way: providing better services at lower costs. What Accuweather and its corporate bretheren would prefer is to keep their club small, and make sure we all have to pay for the data NWS has to collect anyway.

In other news...

[Zorilla]

...Spyware infections on PCs has reduced by 15 percent, possibly attributed to the now potentially unusable WeatherBug "application".

Great...

[Spacejock]

So, not only do they want to charge us for air, but also snow, rain, hail, sleet...

CWOP is Citizen Weather

[vk2tds]

CWOP is the Citizen Weather Observation Programme, a part of NOAA. You can find the data on http://www.wxqa.com/ all about this data. The problem for the private weather industry is that all this data is freely available, and is not able to be restricted in availability thanks to the infrastructure...

With CWOP, all the data is sent to http://www.findu.com/ where anyone can retrieve the data.

Weather data is free this way, thanks to the support of Ham Radio operators internet infrastructure.

Darryl Smith, VK2TDS
Sydney. Australia

Re:CWOP is Citizen Weather

[GPSguy]

CWOP lacks sufficient metadata to provide adequate information on instrument types, calibration, resolution or accuracy, never mind instrument placement in compliance with conventions, standards and norms.

It's a very valuable tool (I use it on my site) but one MUST understand the limitations. As it stands now, it's something we use professionally, but cannot rely on for climatological monitoring.

IF we can start getting the appropriate metadata, perhaps it will be more useful. The QC evaluations performed on CWOP by Patty Miller and Mike Barth at NOAA's Forecast Systems Laboratory provide an invaluable improvement to its usability for "real" work. They do not, however, mitigate the problems associated with siting and resolution.

The concept of a distributed network of sites, maintained by NOAA/NWS and volunteers, is embodied in the COOP program. NWS has a plan to replace all the old sensors with new sensors, enhance some of the instrumentation to extend beyond temperature and rain gauges (the current norm), and collect data electronically at 1 hr (and eventually 5 min) intervals. Coupled with professional guidance on siting and installation (and, yes, this really IS important for consistent data collection) and appropriate metadata, plus a competent QC program, we'll see some marked improvements in the amount and quality of data we recover.

Accuweather Boycott Created

[whitis]

An accuweather boycott has been created at Boycott City . However, it may take 24 hours before the boycott is officially added to the list and you can join. If you want to join, send yourself a reminder message to visit the site tomorrow.

This is my first experiment with such a system. The primary value of such an online boycott is that people can search to find out if people are boycotting a company - and why - before doing business with a company. As an added bonus, when you join a boycott it shows up on the main page thereby raising awareness.

The boycott city system itself is pretty crude and doesn't yet have a large user base.

Re:Accuweather Boycott Created

[GPSguy]

While I happen to support the Fair Weather policy proposal, and at first blush really don't like the approach Accuweather is taking in the lead for this, realistically, they're just the front-men for the attack. It's the commercial weather industry that seeks to restrict access to the NOAA and NWS data, generally, rather than just one company.

A boycott against Accuweather won't accomplish much. It's an attractive idea, but they're not the only players in the industry.

Folks like AWS would prefer to tell you their school-nets are sufficient for climatologic monitoring. Their normal locations are not consistent with what we consider good practice, located atop buildings to keep prying little fingers from destroying the equipment easily, but they claim they have sufficient evidence that there's no significant bias in their readings, and that they should be paid by states to create mesonets using schools as their sites.

And then charge the states for the data, and charge the schools for the weather stations and periodic maintenance.

There are benefits to doing something like this. The concept of contractors instead of dedicated employees allows a governmental entity to cut apparent costs, and allows a private sector industry to thrive. It also tends to drive up costs, overall, because the private sector position will usually be at a higher FTE and overhead cost than the government sector will budget. But, that's OK: It's hidden.

On the positive side, there are economies of scale in having a company or companies do instrument installation and maintenance on a large scale. These may, in the long-run, make such deals work better.

So. Go boycott one firm that's not likely to get a lot of money from this group anyway, and that has a long history of providing good products to its customers. I don't think it'll have a significant impact. Did we accomplish anything?

Re:Should we have to pay twice to get weather fore

[pipo]

"There is no national or continental weather service in Europe; private pilots have to pay for information, usually in the form of two daily faxes. This means that European pilots have to know even more about weather than their American counterparts because they must be able to predict conditions"

Not only there is no weather service, there are in fact no weather at all - Europe hasn't evolved a climate yet, unlike the US... and of course there are no pilots or airplanes whatsoever...

HINT HINT: you are living in a psychiatric hospital

Canadian Climate Data

[barks]

I remember scheming and dreaming a project once upon a time and trying to look for a database that contained various dates and the weather data conditions for that day.

Found a free archive on Environment Canada that does just that for all of Canada.

Re:Canadian Climate Data

[AndroidCat]

For real weather junkies, they need to create a blog with an RSS feed. :)

Argument over data format, not availability

[Chromal]

Interestingly, we have Accu-Weather spearheading an attempt to make the data formats put out by NOAA less accessible to non-meteorologists. Much of this data is readily available in obscure meteorological data formats like the dense GRIB-format 5-dimensional GFS model output and the equally obscure METAR surface obs format (whose byzantine structure dates back to the 1940s when observations were distributed codified and via teletype).

Make no mistake about it-- all of this data is publically available via FTP, or C-band satellite downlink (aka NOAAPORT). What the leader of the industry consortium (which does not represent all meteo firms by a long shot) is apparently protesting is NOAA putting out data in a modern format that ANYONE, not just meteorologists, may be expected to work with. He is, perhaps, upset with the notion that in this day and age of realtime data exchange on the Internet, it really doesn't take a BS in meterology and a publisher like a newspaper, TV station, or radio station to get the weather from the government to the people-- his business's model, acting as an interpreter that (for a fee) translates the data produced by the National Weather Service into something the public understands-- this model of business is becoming incresingly obsolete.

Any protests about NOAA supporting new and more accessible formats is a cynical cry for business or industry protectionism, nothing more. Which is a shame-- there is plenty of room for innovation in the weather industry-- niche forecasts specialized for markets where small-scale accuracy matters (like the agricultural and power industries), or more advanced and interactive web-based tools (like The Weather Underground's NEXRAD interface) can innovate the way the public look at weather data.

Support innovation, not protectionism!

Re:Argument over data format, not availability

[GuidoDEV]

No doubt a great deal of his concern is also over having to re-write a bunch of their application code to accomodate the new formats, in addition to lowering the level of obscure knowledge future competition needs to succeed.

Basically, there is no benefit to updating the formats for old companies like Accu-Weather, thus it's not surprising they would oppose the change. Newer/future businesses, by contrast, will welcome it, as it eases the data-acquisition and interpretation process...not to mention the fact that it makes it easier for TV stations, individuals, etc., to create their own products. My view is that if the reasonably-knowledgeable individual can perform this task, then perhaps the degreed meteorologists (particularly ones with graduate degrees) should be doing something which makes better use of their advanced skills. We may be in the beginning phases of a structural shift within the field of private meteorology, one shifting away from simply providing data and towards providing advanced data analysis. One way or another, seeking industry protection from the government instead of getting off the collective corporate butt and innovating, is the surest route towards declining revenues and unprofitability I can think of. The history books are littered with businesses that stagnated using the protectionist approach, and the history books will be littered with many more (Accu-Weather likely being a prime target if they refuse to put forth the effort to innovate).

Luckily, this data structure change has been in the works for years, and there is probably little Accu-Weather can do about it, as it would negatively impact the NWS since they've already written their next-generation visualization tools using XML, etc. Their current toolset is really starting to show its age, they can't be stuck with it forever. Also, with the NOAAPORT upgrade currently being implemented, anyone with a DirectTV-style satellite dish and a PC will be able to host their own real-time meteorological database. They're even planning on feeding live Level II NEXRAD data across it, which is pretty amazing given the amount of data that represents (about 100GB/day)! So even given a worst-case scenario where most internet access to NWS products is disabled, it really won't take much to access more data than even most businesses, let alone any one individual, could possibly know what to do with.

What I'd like to see from the open-source community are more tools to access the weather data we currently have. Any information you want (short of Level II NEXRAD data, due to bandwidth issues) is available real-time, today. There are almost no applications to deal with it, though. I've often thought of writing tools to do so, but other commitments, combined with little experience writing GUI applications (let alone visualization software), have kept me from following through.

Re:Argument over data format, not availability

[girouette]

I see your point and agree with most of it, but...

GRIB and METAR are not "obscure". They are well-documented international industry standards that serve their intended purpose quite well. Is a tar file "obscure"?

GRIB data was designed as a means to store and exchange weather model output data in its (almost) rawest form. Because it is in binary form, it is only natural that it needs to be post-processed to be visualized or used in other applications.

For those who might be interested : a description of the GRIB format.

Re:Argument over data format, not availability

[GPSguy]

Er... Level II data's available today. If you're interested in a single site, that's easy. If you're interested in a bunch, the bandwidth gets a bit hairy. My typical 5-min volume scan is 14MB/site...

Re:Argument over data format, not availability

[UnrepentantHarlequin]

No doubt a great deal of his concern is also over having to re-write a bunch of their application code to accomodate the new formats, in addition to lowering the level of obscure knowledge future competition needs to succeed.

They want the new formats available to them -- code rewrites and all -- they just don't want us, the people whose tax money is paying for it, to have access to them, so that they can resell us our own data. Can you say "corporate welfare"?

Re:Argument over data format, not availability

[GuidoDEV]

It's available real-time for a fee due to the bandwidth necessary to download it, only archived data is currently available for free. Unless you're aware of some public location where you can download live Level II, in which case please let me know! :-)

Re:Argument over data format, not availability

[GuidoDEV]

I can indeed say "corporate welfare". And I detest it, except in rare situations where it's the lesser of two evils and the alternative would negatively impact the public, as in the late 1980's with Unisys...they were about to go bankrupt and were bailed out by the government so the NEXRAD network could be completed without having to out for bid again, a decade-long process the first time around. Well, even then I detest it, but in situations like that there's not a lot you can do about it. Today, Unisys provides some of the most hideous "services" available, and have continually worked to keep all sorts of data to themselves (such as NEXRAD data, which eventually failed, fortunately). I think it's only a matter of time before they go under, this time for good.

THIS JUST IN...

[Anonymous Coward]

Bending to corporate pressure, The United States government has enstated a mandatory "horizontal blinder" initative. Any person within the United States, it's territories and occupied lands will no longer be allowed to look up or down in order to make judgements about the weather. Any limbs or joints that react to brewing storms will be confiscated.

Re:Should we have to pay twice to get weather fore

[csteinle]

There is no national or continental weather service in Europe;

What's this, then?

Re:Excellent...

[velo_mike]

Anything that can be sold will be sold. Pay up

Those of us who are US taxpayers have already ante'd up for it. Either take our tax money and return a service or (preferably) stop robbing me every pay period than turning around and charging me again.

Re:Should we have to pay twice to get weather fore

[amorsen]

There is no national or continental weather service in Europe

This must definitely depend on which nation in Europe you talk about. In Denmark, DMI provides specialized weather reports and forecasts for aviation, shipping, and farming. DMI is a national institution and many of its services are free.

Put your own WX data online.

[Anonymous Coward]

Get an inexpensive (but good) weather station, such as Oregon Scientific's WM-918 (aka Radio Shack's WX200), connect it to a junk-box PC running something like FreeWX (www.freewx.net - Win32) or WX200d (http://wx200d.sourceforge.net - *nix), and upload it to a webpage, or Weather Underground (www.wunderground.com). Tens of thousands of other people are already doing this.

Re:Put your own WX data online.

[Anonymous Coward]

Weathermen underground network. I wonder how many keyword detectors that set off?

USSR

[bool morpheus()]

In Soviet Russia, the weather monitors you!

Let the NOAA know you want the data to stay free..

[Phil John]

...here is a link to the Word Document being used by the Private Weather Sector to give details about where/how to lobby to NOAA.

Instead of bemoaning the state of the public sector how about actually doing something about it and actively lobby the people in power to keep this free?

Weather Display

[sobinz]

I'm in the navy stationed in guam. With the exception of typhoons we have almost no (very consistant) weather. Out of boredom I rigged up a pretty neat setup. I bought a serial, text-only 4 by 20 character LCD display. I wrote a program that every 5 minutes parses weather.com to determing the description of the weather, and temperature in Bat cave NC and writes it to the display. I can watch the temperatures change with the seasons from here in guam. It also displays a continuous(10 times a second) update of my happiness factor (time in the navy divided by time remaining).
A picture of it can be found here
Also, I put up a copy of the program to anybody that wants it.

Re:Weather Display

[BrK]

So when you are out of the Navy, your time remaining would be zero, and your happiness factor would be a math error, rather than a real number... Not sure if that is the result you intended. :)

Re:Weather Display

[sobinz]

Yes, I suppose you're right that it'll segfault but at the moment when it does, I won't be in the navy any more and will have no need for a happiness factor display. :) My job is like a like a Dilbert strip only worse. Its more like spending all day at the DMV. I spend hours doing non-work for every minute of "real work" (tm) that I accomplish. I dunno if its the navy, or if its nuclear power that I don't like but I'd rather have no involvement with either.

Re:Should we have to pay twice to get weather fore

[whovian]

I make personal heavy use of 3 NWS sources

http://weather.gov/
http://www.spc.noaa.gov/

and

> weather

for local and region forecasts and severe weather predictions. It's all the same information that your local weather forecasters use anyway, and you get it up-to-the-minute. If you want to know why that 'W' sits in the corner of the screen during your favorite TV broadcast, just look it up when you want. The NWS has continually been upgrading their regional web pages, now often including storm reports, summaries, and photos.

I personally don't have a need for commercialized weather as it exists today, as it is not current, not local enough, and has too much advertising.

BTW, I'd encourage anyone interested to drop the NWS some feedback at their sites. They have, IMO been trying really hard to revamp their web pages. (Disclosure: I'm just a weather fan/nut, not employee.)

Put the free NWS data on your website!

[PeeAitchPee]

Check out HAMWeather if you haven't already. It's been around for years and it's essentially a set of scripts which allow you to set up your own AccuWeather or weather.com -type site. It's also got a lot of other additional features like mapping and "weather sticker" creation (dynamically creating a small image with a location's name, current conditions and a little icon representing the current conditions). I've been using it for about two years and while it's not rocket science, I've found it to be a very useful, time-saving tool. The scripts are available in Perl, ASP, and PHP.

We all need free weather data

[SpaceKow]

We all need free weather data Imagine what would happen when there is a disaster... The Big Wigs in the weather industry are just thinking about themselves. http://01weather.com

Ok I have an answer

[Lumpy]

Barry Myers (MS Word doc), president of Accuweather wants you to have pay before using Kweather and other similar tools.

fine. then the US government needs to increase Commercial use of NOAA weather data fees by 100 fold. Little Barry, in his childish hissy fit, fails to realize that the NOAA weather data is the property of the United States Citizens and Government... So let's appease him. Anyone want to intorduce legislation that any commercial use of NOAA data has higher fees and 20% of all profit made from said data must be paid back to help fund NOAA and other government weather research.

It's high time as americans we got off our lazy asses and start smacking around childish losers like Barry and other Company officials that while about people getting something that they pay for through taxes. do what you can to introduce new legislation to "bitch slap" these morons. if worded right it would go through in a heartbeat as it would be a new significan source of income and congresscritters can't turn their back on money.

some of the mapping companies tried this about 5 years ago with the USGS release of their tigerline data maps. they were whining that it would undermine their business and other equally stupid erasons for keeping the data OUT of the public's hands. but they still wanted the free access for themselves.

Re:Ok I have an answer

[Almost-Retired]

And its a good one too!

However, since nothing is ever truely free, you can bet that if Barry has to pay 20% of his gross back to the NWS/NOAA, he will attempt to recover his "losses" by doubleing the rate he charges the tv stations for his service. TANSTAAFL

Cheers, Gene

Re:Ok I have an answer

[Anonymous Coward]

who cares. TV stations dont charge me to watch their tv station. and many stations will simply buy the data directly and use their own meterologists.

barry and his playskool company will become extinct as his operating costs will increase to the point that it is cheaper for the companies to get the data directly.

also many companies buy their data from other meteorological companies that do not reloy on NOAA data at all.

Re:Ok I have an answer

[Anonymous Coward]

This guy can't make up his mind. I wish I could find the e-mail he sent us a few years back when we had to start charging for running a state-wide network. Back then Accuweather was whining because we were charging for our data. He complained that the public shouldn't have to pay twice... blah blah blah

If the public wants to kill University, State, and Federal programs, then by all means, let your representatives know. Just remember when you can't get the data you need because parasitic companies like Accuweather can't get the data anymore, you were the one that cut it off.

The bottom line is that weather data is NOT FREE. It takes a lot of money to create and maintain weather stations. The cost is worth it. If everyone knew how much they depended on it for biological modeling, conservation, aviation, general engineering, etc, they would not have a hard time with paying for it. Companies like Accuweather may provide some value-added products to data, but they do not contribute to the collection, quality, and maintenance of data.

Weather networks are one of those things that government does very well. If you have to pay for it to keep it coming, then pay for it. Trust me, you are getting a hell-of-a-deal. If you think you can do a better job, then do it. Dont be shocked when you figure out that it is very difficult to make a viable private industry weather network profitable.

Re:Ok I have an answer

[david614]

I absolutely agree. This is just a new version of greedy corporations trying to take the public's property while denying access to the public *to* that property. Maybe if they had to pay more for it they would appreciate it more. And NOAA could have a bigger budget for its obviously valuable services.

No! (was Re:Yes!)

[Anonymous Coward]

What is this, the Young republican Convention??

>In Microsoft's defense, they at least created new products (Word, Excel, Access) that did not exist and add features and improvements.
No they did not! Have you heard of Word Perfect? And before that, Wordstar? A brief search on Google shows you are not just wrong but utterly, totaly and completely wrong, misleading and attempting to rewrite history.

Do you by any chance work for Microsoft?

SUBMIT YOUR COMMENTS!

[Alsee]

Be sure to submit a comment through ths page.
Here's the comment I submitted:

As a government agency, the purpose of the NOAA is to serve the public. Data which has been generated or collected using tax dollars belongs to the public and should be freely available to the public.

Information provides the greatest benefit when it is freely available and most widely utilized.

Thus far the NOAA has had a "non-compete" policy. I have no doubt the NOAA is receiving pressure from special interests to maintain that policy and to withhold data from the public. Business is a good and valuable thing when it provides the public with needed services, however the government should NOT be protecting unneeded redundant services at the direct expense and detriment of the public. The government should not be creating an artificial scarcity of information. The public should not have to pay a second time for information it has already obtained through tax dollars.

-

Re:SUBMIT YOUR COMMENTS!

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for the pointer. Here's mine:

Inasmuch as NOAA is a tax-funded government agency, the idea that private industry would have any kind of means of interefering with its data being provided to the public without charge is simply outrageous. The vital services provided by NOAA need to be freely available in the public domain, notwithstanding the ambition of certain elements of private industry to lock up these products and repackaging them for their own profit. In summary, the taxpayer should not be put in a position of having to pay more than once for the products of NOAA. Thank you.

Re:SUBMIT YOUR COMMENTS!

[TheABomb]

According to that page, you can also just e-mail fairweather@noaa.gov.

Re:SUBMIT YOUR COMMENTS!

[Anonymous Coward]

DON'T FORGET to send comments to ALL the addresses so kindly provided in the letter from Accuweather. That includes back splashing it to the author of the Accuweather letter!

Here are the addresses for the lazy folks:

myersb@accuweather.com,fairweather@noaa.gov,DL.J oh nson@noaa.gov,Conrad.C.Lautenbacher@noaa.gov,devan s@doc.gov

Re:SUBMIT YOUR COMMENTS!

[pr0c]

Although I am not good at writing such things, here is what I sent:

As I understand it, a recent proposal indicates that such things as XML weather feeds will be removed in favor of increasing revenue for the private sector. I strongly disagree with this proposal. The taxpayers fund the National Weather Service by tax dollars and it is unacceptable to keep this information private. If these changes take place, I will be writing my representatives to decrease NWS funds significantly since funding can take place from private businesses. I am sure that the weather community will have no problem uniting a group of thousands of taxpayers to attempt to stop and/or reverse this change. Furthermore, you can expect daily, or more often, Freedom of Information Act requests from myself and probably hundreds if not thousands of other people.

Re:SUBMIT YOUR COMMENTS!

[argent]

Here's mine:

If companies like weather.com want exclusive access to weather data, then they need to pay a significant share of the costs of gathering that data directly: exclusive contracts for access to data in the private sector are typically based on the total cost of gathering that data. If they're getting free data, or paying only a token amount for the data, they're in no position to complain... they're getting a free ride from NOAA and will continue to get a free ride from NOAA as time goes on.

In any case, this is unlikely to hurt weather.com: there are hundreds of utility programs that treat weather.com as an "HTML feed" of the NWS data and download and display it without providing weather.com with any advertising revenue. Anyone likely to go "straight to the source" is already leeching off weather.com as it is, they don't see the advertising and don't want the added value weather.com provides. Being able to go straight to NOAA will just cut down on the load weather.com is currently paying for.

And weather.com has the top three things a company needs to succeed: location, location, and location! They're "weather.com", for heavens sake! Their compatition isn't a raw XML feed from nws.noaa.gov, it's other companies that use that feed to provide added value... other *private* companies. What they're asking for is protection not from the government, but from the market itself... and protecting market leaders from private competition shouldn't be in the charter of any agency.

Re:SUBMIT YOUR COMMENTS!

[El Rey]

Mine was similar, though I also complained about the omission of "the general public" as a "user class" in the policy statement.

They considered commercial, academic, and government use of the data and stated that these classes of users should be represented in deciding data formats, etc, but nowhere did I see anything saying that the interests of the general public should be represented as a class of users equal to commercial, academic, and government users.

Re:SUBMIT YOUR COMMENTS!

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it's great that you commented in favor of keeping the XML weather feeds. Unfortunately, I think you got the proposal backwards. You said:

As I understand it, a recent proposal indicates that such things as XML weather feeds will be removed in favor of increasing revenue for the private sector. I strongly disagree with this proposal.

But, as the proposal was actually to move to the XML weather feeds, and expand them to other areas, I'm afraid that your email may do the opposite of what you intended.

they did it a few days ago in france :(

[six]

The assholes at the head of the current french governement decided the exact same thing ...

the french national (and publicly funded) Meteo France web site now asks you to pay if you want to know something else than the *current* weather ... They did the change a few days ago but it seems that nobody noticed here :(

this is not IMHO the kind of ideas the US should rip from the french ...

Re:they did it a few days ago in france :(

[jafiwam]

Any weather is good surrender weather. Current weather has no market value, as when the fleeing reach the front porch they'll know what the current weather conditions are.

Military angle

[Anonymous Coward]

Before you get too dogmatic out there you should keep in mind that in many places aorund the world the met offices sort under the defence department. Weather information is regarde as classified in areas of conflict.

What is interesting is that in times of conflict the weather info was withheld, never (to the best of my knowledge) forged. Only one country is known to have fabricated weather data and that was to make things look shinier for its people than was real.

And now, in year 2004, I see conflicts all over the world and even the US mainland is involved. Don't expect limitations to be lifted overnight but do expect a lot of strange excuses to keep them.

Greek to me

[PsiPsiStar]

What's this weather thing everyone keeps talking about? It's day when the lights are on. It's night when the lights are off. If you hear thunder, turn off your computer. ... don't tell me you guys actually go outside and stuff.

Non-Compete

[njk]

Although I agree with the general position in most of these replies there are some subtle rationals behind the NWS policy.

The NWS neither had the funds, nor the infrastructure, to provide weather data to the widest audience possible so they asked the private sector to accomplish this for them (think 25 years ago). The private sector (5 companies Kavoris, Unisys, ..) were granted exclusive access to the NWS feeds to assist the NWS in their mandate to dissemeniate the weather data as widely as possible.
Technically not everyone could connect to the NWS so these companies were 're-distribution' points. If you were an airline and wanted weather data you couldnt drop a line into NWS but you could into UNISYS. In turns these companies secured some garauntees that if they were going to invest in this infrastructure that a goverment organization (NWS) wasnt going to compete with their business. This worked very well for its time.

That time has gone. Cheap distribution mechanisms such as the internet, satellite, have changed that. This has increased the number of player in the weather game and changed their role. They now (should) be fulfilling the role of value-added generator and not re-distributor.
The raw and marginally processed packages should be available to anyone via the internet and satellite feed (and they are). Pretty animated pictures, custom forecasts, lightning strikes, ... these products should still be left to the private sector.

Re:Should we have to pay twice to get weather fore

[KjetilK]

In Norway we have our corresponding DNMI, and I have a friend who used to work for the "Market Division" there. I think the status of the two institutions are much the same.

I got some inside looks at the battle inside this "Market Division". Generally, scientists think that weather information is a vital resource that should be kept free, and they are fighting for that end inside the institute. But the market realities are that it might not be for very much longer, since the government is cutting back funding every now and then, giving vitally important resources to the people is going to bancrupt them any day now.

Like happened to the Norwegian mapping authority. It was founded in the beginning of 18-hundred something, and by 1890, the whole country was mapped. Funnily, it is now impossible to get a decent map of the country that is not under some kind of copyright, after the mapping authority folded under market pressures. Fortunately, we get our free data from US sources. Thanks a lot, US taxpayers! You pay a lot less taxes than we do, yet manage to get useful common data.

Another example of IPR gone wrong: Anybody care to tell me why a work completely done by 1890 mostly be people who thought that mapping the country was important to break free from the superpowers of the day needs copyright in 2004...?

Barry Myers's argument by age

[AndroidCat]

The creation of a NWS mission lies in an act of Congress from 1890, before the automobile, the airplane, satellite platforms, radar, computers, and the Internet - 114 years ago.

I had no idea that acts of Congress came with an expiry date. Important tip folks: Check your laws' Best Before dates frequently. And change the baking soda on a regular basis too--I think something's gone off in the civil right section.

Re:Excellent...

[aurispector]

Pay twice? These pricks want us to pay over and over again. The current direction of the greedy bastards is to convince congress (or the relevant rule making body) that people should be forced to pay for everything that they COULD be forced to pay for. When it comes to disposable intellectual property be it music, movies or weather reports, computers make it technologically possible to force people to "pay per use". It's like installing a vending machine for your product in everyone's home, worldwide. Since it's basically been proven that copy protection doesn't work they want to make it illegal for anything to be free.

climate modelling @ home

[Anonymous Coward]

BBC ran a story about a new project with climate modelling software you can run @ home:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/38274 61.stm.

To quote:
"The project is the work of climateprediction.net, a consortium of UK universities and the Met Office.". It began on June 22nd :).

Have fun!

Summary of the Word Doc

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's a summary of the Word document:

Our industry has taken hard-to-obtain weather data, produced by the federal government, and has made it accessible to the public.

Our industry has done this without any formal agreements with the government.

The government now wants to make the data easy for anyone to obtain and interpret.

The problem with this ease-of-use strategy is that it may "prevent job growth" and lead to "corporate instability" within the commercial weather industry.

---
Hmmm, sounds like there is a clear up-side and a very nebulous downside to the new NWS policy. The commercial weather industry needs to put together a much stronger argument why this new NWS proposal is not good for the country.

Re:Should we have to pay twice to get weather fore

[Teun]

There is no national or continental weather service in Europe

What a strange remark!

Just as an add on to the list others have started in this thread:
KNMI for The Netherlands or:
(for the linguistically impaired)

Such National and tax funded institutions don't have to stop commercial weather forecasters:
Meteoconsult

Re:This is fucking stupid

[pommiekiwifruit]

Some of us do actually leave our houses sometimes and go to areas over the horizon. And unlike .au we have mountains, rivers, seas etc which mean that the weather does actually vary between places.

taxpayers

[spacepimp]

if it is paid for by taxpayers monies, then it should be freely accessible.. why limit it to people who want a business model off of it. if it devalues their business model, so be it they were only pimping on something we already paid for. their content wasnt theirs to begin with.

Re:taxpayers

[digitalchinky]

Hey, the NSA is funded by taxpayers money, it too should be freely accessable right?

Re:taxpayers

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes

Re:Excellent...

[velo_mike]

Pay twice? These pricks want us to pay over and over again. The current direction of the greedy bastards is to convince congress (or the relevant rule making body) that people should be forced to pay for everything that they COULD be forced to pay for.

You're confusing the public and private sectors.

For things that we've been forced to pay for through taxation, the NWS in this example, should not be able to turn around and charge us again to access the data, other than whatever minimal distribution fee is applicable. We paid, at gunpoint IMHO, for the NWS to collect weather data. I don't have a problem if they want to charge a small printing fee (N cents / copy for example) to distribute it or the equivelent. It's when the data that I already bought is being sold back to me that I have issues.

When it comes to disposable intellectual property be it music, movies or weather reports, computers make it technologically possible to force people to "pay per use". It's like installing a vending machine for your product in everyone's home, worldwide. Since it's basically been proven that copy protection doesn't work they want to make it illegal for anything to be free

This is the private sector, if you don't like it than don't buy it. Nobody is putting a gun to your head and saying "Buy the new Robbie Williams CD or else". If enough people don't like it, the product will disappear (New Coke). OTOH, if "pay per use" takes off on a large scale and you don't like it, you're free to join us luddites on the front porch bitching about the good old days when you bought a CD once.

The key difference is voluntary funding, nobody can force you to buy a product on the free market while taxpayer funded projects are a different matter (the gun to your head).

Weather weirdos

[glrotate]

Why don't you just look out the window? The weatherman has never made the weather any better, so I don't understand the fascination with being up to date on their predictions. If looking out the window doesn't suit you then watch the local news tonight. What's the big deal?

Re:Weather weirdos

[Corydon76]

You obviously don't live in one of the plains states. The forecasts of tornadoes and severe thunderstorms that the NWS provides save lives by allowing people the extra minutes they need to take proper shelter.

No, we can't stop tornadoes, but if we have sufficient advance warning, we can take steps to protect ourselves. This is by far, IMHO, the most valuable service the NWS provides, and it is critically important.

Re:Weather weirdos

[littlerubberfeet]

Say that to a Pilot and he will shoot you with that new TSA issued sidearm. Weather info needs to be free. Pilots, farmers, truckers, shippers, weekend bass fishermen, and the list goes on. These people all require something more then the "local news tonight".

As a pilot, I often need barometric pressures for airports a state away from where I am. My aunt needs dewpoint measurements so she can heat her orchard on frosty mornings. Weather.com, accuweather and FoxNews tonight just don't cut it. Most people wouldn't be able to afford the $100 plus a month private industry would charge for something that is now free.

Re:This is fucking stupid

[mysticwhiskey]

No, I reckon they just think your argument doesn't hold water.

And since when did simply "looking out of the window" give you an idea of what might happen in 24 hours time? Not to mention that if it's night when you take a peek beyond the curtains, you probably aren't gonna see a whole lot.

Do It Yourself

[captnjameskirk]

Forget weather forecasts over the internet. You should build your own barometer.

Re:This is fucking stupid

[Michael Hunt]

Oh shit.

I should avoid posting to /. when I'm pissed.

Sorry everyone.

The inefficiency of private business.

[Anonymous Coward]

We pay around 800 million a year for the NWS. This amounts to less than $3 a person in the country.

Do any of the silly "give my taxes back" people really think that Accuweather would provide all the data a person wants for $3 a year?

Government is infinitely more efficient--and necessarily so because it does not seek 20% profit on every transaction--than private business.

And if you use the "I don't want to have to pay for this unless I choose it" then move to Baghdad. We pay for the common good in this country (except of course for many thieving traitorous corporations and individuals) and it is a good thing. The social benefits of nationalized weather collection have already been pointed out (navigation, airtravel, disaster prevention, military etc.).

It is a shame that Reagan died rather than Reagan's asinine ideas about privatization and the virtues of "private business." A bunch of crooks and theives raping the country is his legacy.

Anyway, what are you gonna do with your $3 a year buy a big mac?

Meteo Fance, Aeroports de Paris....

[Anonymous Coward]

As a Pilot in Fance, I can say that all weather data is available through Meteo France.

As for detailed weather maps, ADP can fax or email one to you anytime, and usually prints the latest copy when you come put you flight plan in...

where are you flying exactly ?

We do and should!

[L0C0loco]

The government must fund and support the weather service activities simply because it is an issue of the health and safety of the public. By your reasoning we should privatize the military too. Given the fact that we (those of us that pay taxes at least) are already paying for this work and the information it generates, we should not have to pay for it again nor be required to provide a subsidy to the "weather corporations" so they can profit from it directly. They need to enhance the products by some value-added activity of their own.

Re:We do and should!

[ichimunki]

By my reasoning, weather services are, and can be, provided by private businesses. The military, however, does things that are otherwise illegal-- bombing cities, killing people, taking prisoners, etc etc. Providing weather services is not illegal as far as I know.

In any case, I never said that this information should not be free (as in beer AND speech). I firmly believe that any time the taxpayers pay for information that we all have a right to that information. What I don't believe is that taxpayers should necessarily be paying for all this-- in fact, the more we pay for it, the more it appears we are subsidizing businesses, even before they might pass this proposed "partnerships" thing.

Re:We do and should!

[87C751]

By your reasoning we should privatize the military too.

Why not? Look how well it's worked for Iraq.

Re:We do and should!

[Anonymous Coward]

Well...sectors and activities of the military ARE being privatized. The secret codewords are "civilian contractor" or "security consultant".

Re:We do and should!

[afidel]

Weather services are something that IS best done by the government. Weather forcasting takes a large number of observation stations across large amount of area. Also areas without large population densities should not suffer inferior forcasting technology which is exactly what would naturally happen under a private network.

Re:We do and should!

[LostCluster]

NWS weather data is in fact free. The government maintains http://weather.noaa.gov/ for specifically that purpose. Absolutely all data the NWS gathers is available via this site.

What are in dispute are new "products" such as XML-based feeds that are a bit more processed than the raw text file formats and HTML formats that are being offered now. It's the same data, just packaged a little more useful.

The NOAA has always been in the business of data gathering, but the main process of refining the data into more useful reports has always been left to private interests. What's being disputed now is where to draw that line...

Re:We do and should!

[Anonymous Coward]

The government must fund and support the weather service activities simply because it is an issue of the health and safety of the public.

Well, let's apply your "reasoning" to:

• Food supply. Clearly a "health of the public" issue, can't be healthy without vitamins
• Automobile safety devices (seatbelts, airbags). Clearly a "safety of the public" issue
• Gyms. Another "Health of the public" issue

So applying your test, you conclude that these should be "funded and supported" by the government? I think the only government left which agrees with you is Cuba's.

Re:We do and should!

[Anonymous Coward]

this well?
http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/06/28/i raq.han dover/index.html

arielb

Broken windows fallacy

[Julian Morrison]

As a Libertarian, I don't support tax funded anything, and that includes weather measuring.

But, also as a libertarian, I find it daft to deliberately block people who know stuff from telling it, so as to "create a market". Trade is a way to mitigate the unpleasant fact that some things in life aren't free. In aggregate it efficiently allocates resources and effort towards making things cheaper, ie: approaching closer to free.

When things actually are free for the taking, "creating a market" isn't efficient, it's wasteful. It's directly analogous to going around with a sack of rocks, "creating a market" for glaziers.

PS: this is also why copyrights and patents are a bad idea...

Re:Broken windows fallacy

[JuggleGeek]

As a Libertarian, I don't support tax funded anything, and that includes weather measuring.

Anything? No police, no roads, no garbage pickup. I'm sure everyone will do a good job of hauling their own garbage to an appropriate spot...

Sorry, but I don't see this as a good thing.

I agree

[zogger]

Personally I have to have some decent weather models to look at as I plan my day and week working outside. It makes a difference what work I do and where I work. For me, for instance now during the heavy rainy season,I need the best updated weather radar map so I can see localised information to see where heavy rain clouds or developing thunderstorms are. Getting hit by lightning is no joke, I took a very near hit before and it's *no freekin joke*, so if I can see that-just a for-instance-I have around two hours before a big storm can hit, I can go farther away and work for an hour and half and still beat feet back to shelter. Sometimes just a general forecast isn't detailed enough without seeing the map, with a map you can see if the storm will hit, or move on by you by a few miles, so it's safe to go work. I currently run two maps on my homepage group and check them frequently. Another for instance, if I know after around such and such a time it will be raining steadily, I can stop and go get setup on a big equipment repair job inside someplace, or just use that downtime to go to town for supplies, etc.

I'd like to see them run a video service wirelessly as an adjunct to the weather radios, perhaps a dedicated appliance that had a small screen for the images display, and an even faster refresh rate. Of course that means the government would have to install small TV transmitters all over, but perhaps it's possible somehow wth slow scan radio instead of live streaming for the radar image. I don't have cable or satellite, so for me it's the combo of the web and various weather radios I have. I even keep my two meter portable transceiver locked on the nearest forecast freq for VERY bad emergencies, at least I got a starting point for action then, and it's the one radio I'll grab if I need to evacuate to either the nearest concrete structure or wherever, depending on the emergency.

The audio warnings though should be more customisable, currently it's not (that I know of, maybe it is with newer equipment). I don't want to be told every few minutes it is in fact raining out, I'd want to de-sensitise the warning signal then to actual hail/tornado warnings *only* at that point. Right now you get two choices, listen to the alert go off every 10 minutes, or turn the broadcast on and try to monitor it as you sleep, which plain just don't work.

And people crop farming need even longer range forecasts, they have to know if it's good to plant on x day so that the seeds just don't sprout then wither in some heat wave with no rain, or for spraying purposes, etc, you don't want to spray one day then have it wash off the next, or say for cultivation and plowing, you don't want to only half plow then try to finish in a sea of mud.

I'll be sending them my two cents on the subject.

It should be free

[Almost-Retired]

In my mind, since the NWS is a taxpayer funded government entity, we are already payng for it.

As for accuweather et all, these people DO furnish a nicely value added service in that much of the flashy graphics we tv people show you every night are supplied by these services. In terms of time and labor required to produce those flashy gfx sequences, its money well spent to pay a service like accuweather a 4 digit fee per month and get them ready made in a quite timely manner, based on data less than an hour old when that cast goes to air.

But since I as a taxpayer paid for it in the first place, any artificial restrictions put in place so that the likes of companies and servicers like accuweather have exclusive access, are IMO both illegal and counterproductive to public safety.

Cheers, Gene

What about the government need for weather info

[nonameisgood]

The military needs it. The White House needs it. As a matter of public good, pilots need up to the minute reports. Engineers need historical data, as do farmers and municipal planners.

AND, who do you think runs the data acquisition end of things. All of the airport-based weather stations could never be duplicated by private enterprise due to sheer scope.

And I imagine we all appreciate the pure research of the Storm Prediction Center and National Hurricane Center.

Open technology?

[Maljin Jolt]

Weather measure and forecast is a good theme for distributed p2p network application over internet. It is only a matter of time only until some smart man will get an idea and start an open source project on it.

Re:Open technology?

[GPSguy]

No, it isn't.

Surface weather observations can be well delivered via an internet model, and aggregated. When it comes to assimilation and prediction, your statement becomes much more problemmatic.

In general, models today are gridded parcel physics computations or computational flow dymanics models. These models are best performed with low-latency computational systems as NUMA clusters.

Grid models tend to require processing of discreet elements or simple processes of nearly trivial complexity with no particular interest in whether the work gets done, when it gets done or if the data are reported back. Because of the interdependency of the bounding conditioned enforced in a rigidly gridded model, or the nature of a CFD model, losing a data parcel product would skew the overall results.

Looking at an example, SETI@home takes a chunk of data and performs an FFT, returning an integer result for each little piece of the chunk. These integers are repackaged as an array and eventually returned to the server. Later (much later) analysis allows the server to determine, from this pre-processing if the parcel of data originally analyzed had something of potential interest for reanalysis in a more rigorous fashion.

In weather prediction, the pieces have to come together in a timely manner, as a more distinct data product for integration into the product (output) grid. A missing piece adversely affects subsequent analysis or results in a hole in the data. This is bad.

It should also be noted that trying to get back floating point results from a diverse set of systems with different OS, processor and RAM configurations could provide some interesting results.

Typically, today, numerical weather prediction takes place in a serial fashion on computers designed for "normal" desktop use, over a small area, or with large grid sizes, or for speed and/or finer-grained resolution, on a cluster or formal supercomputer where message-passing allows the more normal method of loop-unrolling to be utilized, and where, rather than parcing out large data chunks and hoping for a result, smaller pieces are distributed to the nodes and they pass their results directly back into the central node.

It might be an interesting exercise to play with Globus message passing over a geographically distributed array of similar processors. Sounds like another research project...

Pay per use

[nurb432]

The goal of ALL content providers.. why be suprised the weather-dude wants to do it too?

NOAA / Accuweather information is not timely

[mazphil57]

If you want to know what the temperature was 1-3 hours ago, go to NOAA. Sometimes the weather stations stop responding for hours, even days. These same non-current temperatures are then picked up and reported by "Accuweather". I found this out when my AC died and I needed to know what the CURRENT temperature was so I could cool my house with outside air.

When the system is working "correctly", you can go to the NOAA website at 8:05am and get the temperature, barometric pressure, etc. at 6:53am.

Kweather is even worse. The 'update now' button almost never works, so even if a 1.5 hour ago temperature is available it will try to cling onto it for an extra hour or more "to reduce network abuse" I guess; when I looked at the marvelous C++ source code I was amazed that someone could code a "fetch FTP page, parse, display in a KDE button" in 500000+ lines of incomprehensible C++.

If you need the current weather conditions, buy an expensive weather station; I think most of the junk in the stores has a precision of plus/minus 5 degrees F.

it's gov data - has to be free in some public form

[jpellino]

NWS is under NOAA which is under Commerce - it has always provided, like NASA a set of data that are public , then can have value added and resold. Some part of it has to be free to the public as with *most* government public interest data.

Then it gets sticky - e.g., LANDSAT is managed by EROS, who gives thumbnails for free but 30m thematics for big bucks - but gives each GLOBE school a 15km2 scene for 'free'

It is however a very twisty maze of who gets the data. Everyone commercial gets their data from NWS then does god-knows-what to it as a VAR essentially and sells it to you on some other channel / service / site...

The closest thing to open source weather may be weather underground which was started by Perry Samson's group at UM Ann Arbor - it too went commercial and is ad-heavy, but it can be done.

Barry's model has been since the original PC/Apple/Mac app days to get you to pay for his version of the presentation of the data. This was back when writing a GUI to weather data was realtively heavy duty stuff - you had to write an app around it - it was pre-web.

The NWS pages (and the forecast discussion) is a very rich and friendly set of digested data now - the Watson OSX interface is darn good, uses NWS data barely digested and good radar, but then the added value services are still valuable - for instance I want the intellicast radr summary graphic (cloud height, cell direction and ground speed) on my phone - so i can get a bike ride in and not get blasted...

Teh caveat here is that NWS is NOAA is Commerce because the first priority is keep commercial travel safe - so this is all worth keping an eye on - the commercial intersts WILL pay for the data if it ends up with a toll on it...

Been here before

[Anonymous Coward]

This isn't the first time that Accuweather has tried to limit public access to NWS products. See the National Hurricane Center website for some information on Accuweather's attempt in 2003 to block the NHC from issuing hurricane advisories in mobile format (WAP/WML):

http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/tpcwap_responses.shtml

Pay particular attention to the two letters linked near the top of that page.

I would strongly encourage everyone to submit comments to the NWS on their Fair Weather Policy. The comment period ends June 30.

can we demand our money back...

[Anonymous Coward]

...if they fuck up the forecast?

Watch for new DMWA...

[LoadWB]

Aterwards, the Weather Information Association of America will lobby the government to introduce the Digital Millenium Weather Act which will make predicting, forecasting, or even speaking of the weather an incarcerable offense, as such actions would circumvent the for-pay protection scheme of the WIAA. As part of the effect of this law, anyone who owns or purchases equipment capable of detecting barometric preasure, temperature, wind speed, and other atmospheric factors would be guilty of posession of the implements of a felony.

I imagine the FBI busting into Wal-Mart HQ looking for records of people who bought glass barometers and those cool Gallileo thermometers.

Whhheeeeeeeeeeee!!!

Support costs?

[chiph]

I want the data to be free (as a taxpayer, I've already paid for it). But at the same time, I want to make sure the NWS isn't innundated with tech-support calls from newbies: "What's xml and why are people using it?", "i cant read it file -- can u help me?", and so forth.

I'd like to see them concentrate on weather forecasting & reporting, and not hand-holding entry-level programmers. Perhaps a service like NTP is needed for weather data, where there are different strata, and you need agreements to use the higher-level servers.

Chip H.

A good free weather site

[Chatmag]

The one I prefer is Weather Images Their site links to a lot of free radar images, satellites, etc. And a discussion board.

It would be off topic to answer in detail

[Julian Morrison]

...but I could summarize my response as: the very things you mention are often enough handled privately, successfully, right now. This is not atypical.

Re:It would be off topic to answer in detail

[JuggleGeek]

So, once you have no taxes and no government, how does that differ from anarchy?

Re:It would be off topic to answer in detail

[psykocrime]

So, once you have no taxes and no government, how does that differ from anarchy?

FWIW, the parent post presents a fairly radical view of Libertarianism. Libertarians by and large, are not in favor of *no* government, but want the smallest, least intrusive government possible.

In the case of the United States, that generally means supporting the idea of a limited constitutional republic, with as much power as possible pushed down to the state, or preferably local level. This is so that decision making on things like spending and taxes happens as close as possible to the people affected by same. Thus the people are more directly able to influence those decisions, and government becomes more accountable / responsible.

Libertarianism != Anarchy

Re:It would be off topic to answer in detail

[Anonymous Coward]

I truly wish these Libertarianism fetishists would just f* off and die.

The whole dogma is about spouting economic theory as an explaination of everything. Well, guess what, this is the real world, with real exceptions which have to be examined and debated. It is quite obivous that here, weather is one of them.

It doesn't matter how much sense economics seem to make in theory, in the real world calculations on paper frequently have to be jury rigged. Also in the real world tornadoes can kill you. I find it interesting that Libertarianism makes an odd exception that governments are granted the use of militaristic force to protect the people, yet the environment (which in north america poses much greater personal threat) is not granted the same exceptions. Of course not, this would cut too deeply into the dogma's absolute assertation of private supremacy.

If there is one absolute - it's that you should never trust someone claimbing to have "all the answers", as the overly simplistic Libertarians do.

Who pays for it?-OSS results.

[Anonymous Coward]

"You see, the products that NOAA currently offer, themselves, pose no threat to AccuWeather or other large organizations. It is just data, and most people don't want to look at coded data. They want an end product."

Which OSS will cheerfully provide.

Horseshit

[Croaker]

if there's something that the private sector is willing to do for-profit, then the government simply should not compete with them.

Absolutist Libertarian drivel. You mean I can start up any business that dies something the government does, and then force the government not to do it anymore? So, if I start a business of printing IRS tax forms, and want to charge $50/ea. for 1040 forms, I can forc the IRS to stop printing and distributing them free?

Why not let the government do the things it can do efficiently, and for the greater good, and let the private sector worry about the things it can do most efficiently? Free weather data is a huge benefit to all... like a (mostly) free road system. Why privatize it just so someone can extract extra money out of people?

Most of the posts also miss the business model. The government collects the raw data, and that is made freely available. What Accuweather and the like do is turn that raw data into value-added products like maps with pretty colors, icons, etc. They translate the science into a form that average people understand.

No one missed the business model. That Accuweather adds value by interpreting data doesn't perclude other individuals from getting the data the National Weather Service collects and doing the same thing for free. That's what the Accurweather people are asking for... a ban on the free flow of information. They want to privatize this public knowledge under lock and key, so they and they alone can profit from it. People aren't looking to shut down Accuweather... they are just asking for the same priviledge that Accuweather has.

A value-added business model is perfectly fine. But if you cannot make a profit off of a freely available resource that you add value to, then you should find another business model, not try to privatize the free resource.

Your argument that they don't hold the entire system so they shouldn't hold any of it doesn't make sense. Otherwise the analogy could be extended like this: Microsoft owns Windows, so other complanies shouldn't write software for it. Apple owns the OS AND the hardware, so other companies shouldn't write software for it. These are not sentiments often found on /. Why should weather forecasting be any different?

Bogus analogy. Microsoft and Apple own their platforms. And yes, as owners of those platforms, they could close them to outside developers. Windows and OS X systems are open in that anyone can develop software for them. Apple and Microsoft know that if they tried to control the platforms to that level, they'd be sunk, because there's no way for them to develop all of the software people would want on a PC. The market wouldn't tolerate it.

Have you tried to develop software for a the PS2, Game Cube, Xbox, or other gaming platform? Those aren't open systems. You have to get the developers kits from the owners of those systems. Do you see the /. crowd howling about that all day?

Accuweather doesn't own the data collected by the national weather service. They have no part in creating that data. Closing the data to the general public because Accuweather wants to protect its business interests would be like Red Hat closing the source to Linux because they want to protect their revenue stream.

Re:Horseshit

[Pendersempai]

Absolutist Libertarian drivel. You mean I can start up any business that dies something the government does, and then force the government not to do it anymore? So, if I start a business of printing IRS tax forms, and want to charge $50/ea. for 1040 forms, I can forc the IRS to stop printing and distributing them free?

I agree with you about the drivel part -- I think the most poetically just fate for libertarians would be for them achieve the policies they advocate and then have to live in the mess that results. The problem, of course, is that we'd have to live there too.

That said, your IRS forms example sort of backfires. In that case, by his philosophy, you absolutely should be able to print them for $50 each, and the government should back off. But as soon as you pulled in your first sale, someone else would offer the service for $40. And then $25. And before you knew it, the private sector would be locked in intense competition to print IRS forms as cheaply as possible, stabilizing at a point of zero profit, and probably working more efficiently than the IRS's own laserjets do today.

A better example might be police coverage. When police are privatized, only people who can afford the premiums will be protected. At that point, it's practically (if not theoretically) legal to murder a homeless man in the street, 'cause where's the profit in investigating that?

Or maybe a good one is voting. Suppose I offer to conduct national elections for free -- should the country take me up on that offer? I promise I won't cheat... :)

Re:Horseshit

[Anonymous Coward]

"Accuweather doesn't own the data collected by the national weather service. They have no part in creating that data. Closing the data to the general public because Accuweather wants to protect its business interests would be like Red Hat closing the source to Linux because they want to protect their revenue stream."

Isn't SCO wanting to protect it's revenue streams
by actioning IBM?

Well here is my weather station for Toronto

[Anonymous Coward]

You can get free weather information from my weather station.

http://65.49.20.176/html/weatherupdates.html

I have a lot of friends look at my weather station from work. Since I live close enough to work.

Weather information will always be free....

Free clue

[Registered Coward v2]

1. Regulations exist to protect incumbents - wether or not that was the original intent. (Not an original idea, but it did win a Nobel Prize in Economics) Which is why when companies complain about two much regulation, they're really complaining about ones which cost them money but don't keep others out.\\2. Comment on the rule - that's the way to make agencies pause and think, as well as give them political coverage if they make a decision corporate interest oppose. The lattter linked to the /. article provides a great template for making your voice heard - use it. I did.

limits environmental and climat studies

[monkeyboy87]

this data wants to be free. by creating a charge for access to this data, studies of climate and the environment will be crippled. studies of power plant emissions, pulp and paper toxics emissions can be carried out without access to such data.

Such information should be free, period

[Pecisk]

Very short and insightful comment: it should be free. And it will stay free. Just because someone built it's business on information, provided by goverment and now is frightened that 'sky is falling'... Sorry. Be smarter next time.

I'm not against business, but business IS a risk. It's the same way to make a business plan, hoping that country won't change taxes for 100 years. So, beat it.

Re:Such information should be free, period

[calidoscope]

IMHO, the information provided by the NWS clearly falls into the categories of promoting "general welfare" and "interstate commerce" as mentioned in the preamble of the US Constitution.

The gent from Accuweather wrote an article for Scientific American a few years ago. His arguments for privatizing weather don't make any more sense now than they did a few years ago.

All for it

[Chanc_Gorkon]

I always found it interesting that weather.gov has existed for many years now and there have always been sights to get the data (in the US) for free. Accuweather can stuff it. I would like to see a multiplatform weather warning bug programmed by NOAA/NWS residing in the menu bar on OS X, the tray in Windows and what have you for the other OS's. I trust the NWS alot more then I trust accuweather and the weather channel. I will still however pay for the weather channel as what other channel (local or not) has hotter weather babes (Kristina Abernathy is hot) and stupider men standing in the middle of Category 3 hurricanse getting hammered!

Patent'd!

[teknokracy]

In other news, Microsoft has patented Looking Out The Window, crushing both personal weather forecasts, as well as another senseless infringement on their OS trademark.

Pay for something that may not be right?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like something else that we know... :)

For the time being, I think that I'll get my forecast by looking out the window.

Re:Pay for something that may not be right?

[drbill28]

As a rule of thumb, NWS forecast are generally failry accurate up to 3 days out. Of course not always, but generally they are right in terms of general conditions. There just isn't enough data to accurately predict weather more than 3 days out. No, we shouldn't have to pay for this service. Accu-Weather is even worse than the NWS at what they do. Not only does Accu-Weather use free data for their radars, they don't predict their own weather. No matter what they say, they just dissemeinate the NWS forecasts. Maybe with a number adjusted here and there. Basically what they want is to charge not only for data, that we pay for, but for a forecast that wasn't made by them to begin with. That was made by a NWS forecaster, that we pay the salary of, using the same data that Accu-Weather gets, that we paid for, using equipment, that we paid for. Stupid...

Corporate Greed

[drbill28]

The past year working for my brother in law has taught me a lot of things. You can count on anyone who owns a business no matter big or small to have a good chance to become the most miserable people you know.

This Accu-Weather fellow is a lot like my brother in law. My brother in law has no respect for anyone but himself and his business. He would walk over anyone to save or make a dollar. Example: He found it conveneint to stop paying me and only pay his providers because he "doesn't have the money right now to pay me", when by law he has to pay me first. Then make comments that businesses shouldn't have to do that after I threatened to call the DOL. Then he made a promise to pay up, and to keep paying just so I'd would write additional programs for him so he can start his new business then it ends up he was just using me with no intention of paying my due funds. He also made it convenient to not to keep the records of hours. So I'll have a hard time collecting because records no longer exist.

Accu-Weather is no different than my brother in law. Another company that doesn't see beyond itself, and feels that it has a supposed right to exist no matter what. So, we should give up our right to freedom of information to placate this bozo. You can boil this whole situation down to these simple statements.

1. - Company wants the public to pay for goods that were previously free, and to pay more for existing goods.

2. - The public now needs to earn more money to pay for goods and services. They demand more pay from their employer.

3. - Employers and corpaoration like Accu-Weather and my brother in law's business feel they shouldn't have to shell out more money so they send labor overseas.

It's amazing the way corporations operate. They feel like they have a right to exist forever. I went to college to major in meteorology to begin with, I ended up in CS, but all my friends who graduated agree with me, that Accu-Weather products are not good to begin with. For a company that is freely given everything it needs to create state of the art forecasting products. Thay sure do a horrible job. It's just a rehash of the NWS forecast. Which are not good to begin with either. I live in Pittsburgh right now and the one station that uses Accu-Weather by far delivers the worst weather forcast out of all Pittsburgh stations. With the NWS having the ability to deliver better data and products to the consumer, companies like Accu-Weather are no longer useful.

They lost, they were in a business of packaging public data. They are no longer relevent. They should've had a contigency plan. They knew very well going into this that using a service provided by public funds can't work forever. It'd be like Microsoft Windows becoming irrelevent by a better operating system like Linux. Or better yet, an entirely new innovative system of operating a computer that renders Windows obsolete. Barring their other products, Microsoft would feel it has a right to exist, and that steps need to be taken to keep innovation down to ensure that their product is the lone product out there. If that happened and Microsoft would go out of business because of it. Then oh well, you lost, get out of the game, you're no longer needed.

It's amazing the way a corporation thinks. I've learned how stupid and backward these people think first hand. A business should no longer be treated as if it were a person and more as a thing run by a person. I'm tired of people like my brother in law who is so far to the right he makes Bush look like a centrist. Whatever happened to common sense?

Sorry if my rant makes no sense or is enfuriating to anyone. I'm just sick of my situation and the way things are run in this country. I could ramble aimlessly all day about these sort of things I'm so tired of it.

Patent the data?

[dacarr]

Patenting the data that constitutes a weather forecast is like trying to patent water.

Re:Patent the data?

[C_Kode]

Patenting the data that constitutes a weather forecast is like trying to patent water.

Don't even think about infringing on my water patent. I will go SCO on your ass in a heartbeat!!! ;)

Oooh! Oooh! I know!

[DivideByZero]

Different name, and more guns.

Go and reply to the NWS

[rspress]

They have had links off their page for some time now asking the public about what they should do.

I sent mine in weeks ago telling them that since we are picking up the tab for what they are doing, we should be getting the data for free. Currently past data sets for even local areas will cost you money so you can't even do your own weather research for recreational purposes.

Make your voice known! Go to there site and let them know that we want what we paid for.

http://www.nws.noaa.gov/fairweather/

Send me the bill....

[kin242]

So am I going to get billed for looking out of the window? It strikes me as a bit strange considering weather reports are used in so many potentially life-saving situations...

President Barry

[Anonymous Coward]

I could be wrong, but it seems like someone dropped the ball on this. Barry is not the president of Accuweather. The real president's name is Joel. I know him because he's sent me a scholarship the past two years. If you don't believe me, check the "About Us" section of the Accuweather website. Unless "Barry" is a Nickname for Joel or whatever his middle initial "N" stands for, Joel Myers is the President of Accuweather, not Barry. Maybe Barry is his son?

Where to send your comments:

[AIXadmin]

Be sure to send your comments too:
Official comment address:
fairweather@noaa.gov

and

General D.L. Johnson
Director of the National Weather Service
DL.Johnson@noaa.gov

Admiral Conrad C. Lautenbacher, Jr.
Under Secretary of Commerce and NOAA
Administrator
Conrad.C.Lautenbacher@noaa.go v

Secretary Donald L. Evans
Office of the Secretary, Department of Commerce
devans@doc.gov

Also find out who your congressman is at:
http://congress.org/congressorg/home/

0wn weather

[Barryke]

Thats just silly, i'm not paying for the weather.

I'll just make my own.

The Weather Channel Is A Menace

[istartedi]

I'm as much against government regulation as anybody, but when a private organization proves to be a public menace, then it's time to do something about it.

Why am I coming down on the Weather Channel?

Well, a couple years ago I was watching some thunderstorms build to the south of us. I turned on the weather channel and they were running some stupid "show". The local cable operator was still running radar feeds back then, but it was a Sunday so guess what? They were showing a baseball game on that channel. In Spanish.

I had to turn to my humble local ABC affiliate to get the real skinny: a tornado was approaching.

That's right. A relic of the "3 major networks only" days was more informative than the cable system.

The thunderstorms veered east and struck La Plata, Maryland. Yes--this was the F-4 tornado that wiped much of La Plata off the map. If you live in the DC area, you certainly heard of it.

If the storm had continued on track and hit Fairfax County, you might not have heard about it if you were relying on the Weather Channel. TWC is worse than useless--they are a public menace, and will kill people by strangling vital public information if we let them.

Keep the weather info free. REQUIRE the cable company to restore the radar feed. And *fund* it. I won't mind paying $1 extra in federal taxes per year for this.

Re:The Weather Channel Is A Menace

[LostCluster]

When TWC is airing such a documenary show ("Atmospheres" and "Storm Stories" are the current titles) the "Local on the 8s" feature still continues uninterrupted. The shows have to take a break every 10 minutes to allow that to happen. If you want local information from TWC, there's not really much point to watching the other 8 minutes of the hour, the 90 seconds there is all you're really going to get.

If a tornado warning was issued for Fairfax County, the computer that generates the local forecast would have overtaken the video with a full red screen alert and added a beeping sound to the national audio. However, tornados rarely travel in a straight line and a National Weather Service warning is only issued once a tornado exists to communites that that will be hit by it. Since the tornado changed directions before heading into your area, there no reason for a warning to be issued.

I fear that your local TV station needlessly panicked you. Tornados are devistating storms, but they affect a very narrow path. That's why NWS only puts out warnings to the communities in immediate danger. You weren't. You could have gone about your business without having much to fear.

I sent this:

[KingPrad]

This regards the policy on internet publication of weather data that is currently being revised.

The NWS is a taxpayer-funded organization and should seek to provide maximum freedom of information to the public on collected and analyzed weather data. The technology to publish this information is available free via RSS feeds or metadata publishing systems and using free and open data formats such as XML.

Private companies object to the NWS releasing free information because they would like taxpayers to pay for weather information twice - once to fund the NWS and again to actually get the information through a private company. This is wrong - the NWS should release information freely since the code to do so is essentially zero after some initial setup.

Private companies can still develop software to better present this information, but the information should be free for all. Taxpayers should not have to pay for access to information that they have paid to be collected.

Thank you for forwarding these comments to the appropriate group.

----

Great, but broken

[Xoc-S]

Since this article pointed the Web Service out, I gave it a try using Visual Studio .NET and ASP.NET. It was a breeze to connect to the web service and get the XML back, taking only a couple of minutes to write the code.

I then made an XSLT style sheet to format the XML. The XML is organized in a very difficult to use format because different elements have corresponding items in other elements, rather that nesting the items. Making XSLT organize this took the better part of five hours, and I pretty much know what I am doing. If it had been organized better, it would have been a 15 minute task.

The other major flaw is that the maximum latitude the web service accepts is 47N! Seattle is at 47.5N, and the Canadian border is at 49N. What the heck were they thinking, leaving off the weather for the top several hundred miles of the continental United States (much less Alaska)!

Old Accuweather custtomer

[Anonymous Coward]

I actually had an Accuweather dial-in account for several years for $10 a month. It provided text forecasts and tabular information just fine, but what I really wanted (and couldn't get, given the limitations of my dialup account) were satellite pictures and charts for Northern New England, since I did a lot of outdoors activities there. Once satellite pics and weather info became available on the internet (first via gopher, later www) from universities and other low-budget operations (not the NWS, by the way), Accuweather was history. The bottom line is that a revolution occurred in the dissemination of weather information that greatly benefited ordinary people like me, and commercial weather companies made ZERO contribution to that revolution. So what is it that Mr. Myers wants me to do?

So do something about it.

[rburgess3]

I fully agree. And, since the article on the FP of /. kindly included the link to the RFC page of the NOAA... I wrote them this nice comment. Feel free to use any or all of it in YOUR comments. Make Mr. Meyer feel realllly bad that his little story made the news here.

[The following text is public domain and may be used without attribution]

I have just read over your proposed policy change, as well as Barry Meyer's response, available at this address: http://www.weatherindustry.org/BARRYMYERS-AMS-0318 04.doc . I must say that I cannot possibly disagree with Mr. Meyer more. The NOAA is a publicly funded institution providing data that could never possibly contain anything that would be classified.

Accordingly, I am of the firm belief that any data collected by the NOAA should be made available for public (i.e. the general population, not merely other agencies) as soon as is practicable, in whatever format is easiest for the public to consume.

Mr. Meyer, and for that matter, the rest of the private weather sector, need to realize that they should never be the sole beneficiaries of the collective tax dollars spent each year by the U.S. in providing such a vitally important service.

I am tempted to make the comparison of the difficulties that the RIAA and MPAA are currently having with the digital revolution. Mr. Meyer and the PWS need to update their business models, not attempt to change the law.

[End of Public Domain Section]

Re:So do something about it.

[rburgess3]

GAH! no matter how many times you use the dang 'Preview' button, something always slips by. grrrrr.

[The following text is public domain and may be used without attribution]

I have just read over your proposed policy change, as well as Barry Meyer's response, available at this address: http://www.weatherindustry.org/BARRYMYERS-AMS-0318 04.doc . I must say that I cannot possibly disagree with Mr. Meyer more. The NOAA is a publicly funded institution providing data that could never possibly contain anything that would be classified.

Accordingly, I am of the firm belief that any data collected by the NOAA should be made available to the public (i.e. the general population, not merely other agencies) as soon as is practicable, in whatever format is easiest for the public to consume.

Mr. Meyer, and for that matter, the rest of the private weather sector, need to realize that they should never be the sole beneficiaries of the collective tax dollars spent each year by the U.S. in providing such a vitally important service.

I am tempted to make the comparison of the difficulties that the RIAA and MPAA are currently having with the digital revolution. Mr. Meyer and the PWS need to update their business models, not attempt to change the law.

[End of Public Domain Section]

The Weather Profit Scheme

[elpapacito]

1. Notice people are getting something for free or for very little
2. Claim that a weather network costs billion to make, like the famous military toilet seats and wrenches at $1000/one
3. Claim that "private will do better then govt"
4. Claim that giving people data for nearly free is unfair competition even if data was paid by people. Cry like a wuss with your congressman.
5. Have people believe all that bull
6 ... ?
7. Massive profits.
7.a Make private tornado chasing illegal, claiming it's more dangerous then...a tornado
7.b Cook the books to claim hired tornado hunters are paid $300k/year, so you must charge for data.
7.c Hire university students as tornado hunters temps and pay them per tornado chased, IF the tornado does touch the terrain and if it goes clockwise in the northern emisphere.
7.d Even MORE massive profits, cost are socialized, profits are privatized. Everybody but a few billion luser win.

It doesn't

[Julian Morrison]

We even call it that.

Re:It doesn't

[JuggleGeek]

In that case, why don't you call yourself an anarchist instead of a Libertarian? Because I don't think that is what most libertarians are looking for. You (or libertarians reading this) can email me. I know we're off topic here - I'm trying to understand how you think things should work. Honestly, I don't see it, but 'splain it to me if you want.

Pay only once.

[rice_burners_suck]

I wouldn't mind paying for companies to keep satellites in operation and weather forecasters in a job, but only if I were signing up for that service, just as I would for any other service. However, I would mind very much if the same service is already covered by the taxes that I pay, because that would mean that I'm paying money to receive information that is supposed to belong to the public. I hate businesses that make you pay for something that is already covered and paid for.

The only way I would agree to pay such a fee is if these companies were the only parties paying the government to keep these systems in operation. In other words, pay only once, regardless of who I'm paying...

Keep it free!

[KC7GR]

I don't think anyone should have to pay ANYthing (other than the obvious portion of one's normal tax dollars that go to support NOAA/NWS) to get weather info!

It never ceases to amaze me how greedy and unprincipled the private sector can get. On the one wing, there's a ton of links on sites like Yahoo!, MSN, ad nauseum, all pointing to weather forecasts that are crammed with advertising.

On the other wing, it only takes a little common sense to go straight to the source for weather data that costs nothing, is as accurate as our current level of science can manage, and is not cluttered with distracting ads.

What's going to be next? An attempt to privatize, and charge for, the VHF weather radio broadcasts? Oh, the boaters and fly-boys will love that one...

Sheesh....

Patent it!

[dabydeen]

I think the SCO Group should start the patent application to patent the idea of putting weather forecasts online -- I'm sure Daryl's good Mormon upbringing that taught him to sue first and ask questions later, would have given him the idea to put weather forecasts online decades ago. That way Americans can pay three times for their weather forecasts. Just think about that -- every time you send an email message that says it's nice and sunny out there, you would have to pay license fees! Taken to the extreme -- you wouldn't be able to discuss the weather around the water cooler, as you'd be freely sharing information with people who didn't pay for their weather information! You would be a weather pirate! (Yes, way too early in the morning -- and it's quite muggy out there.)

Free weather on the web

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear Slashdot Community,

I am afraid you have been taken by someone with a hidden agenda on the National Weather Service policy issue. The information originally posted (anonymously, I note, my name follows my post) pertaining to the commercial weather industry could not be farther from the truth.

Rather than wanting the National Weather Service to withhold data, we are 100% in favor of the National Weather Service releasing 100% of its data in real time. The National Weather Service DOES NOT release 100% of its data now. Among the examples of data it withholds are its real time hurricane wind field analysis and its new, faster, tornado detection algorithm. We believe that all taxpayers have paid for this information and all should have access to it.

So, what are the real issues?

I believe what the original writer really wants is a proposed change in National Weather Service policy to allow it to directly compete with the private sector to go through. Proponents are trying to muddy the water with the phony "witholding data" issue.

Our position is that National Weather Service should not compete with the private sector in meteorology. We believe the proper role of the federal government is to:

Create inftrastructure. Launch the weather balloons, take the observations, run the routine computer models, etc.
Provide storm warnings for the public-at-large
Perhaps provide routine forecasts for the public-at-large, but this one is debatable (i.e., more than 90% of the weather forecasts now in use come from the private sector, why expend taxpayer resources duplicating that effort?)

Everything else, besides forecasts and warnings for the public, should be done by the private sector. If you want a specialized product (note: not data), you could use NWS raw data to create it yourself OR hire a private sector company. The choice is yours now and we want it to remain that way.

The National Weather Service is proposing a change in its policy to allow it to directly compete with the private sector and use taxpayer dollars to create customized products. How would you like it if the government suddenly decided to reverse policy and use your tax dollars to compete with you??

If you watch The Weather Channel®, you are watching the private sector in action. The forecasts they present every eight minutes are their forecasts, not the National Weather Service's. Most all television meteorologists do NOT present the National Weather Service's forecast. If you get the weather from www.weather.com, www.accuweather.com, www.intellicast.com, etc., you are getting weather from the private sector. Note that all of these are FREE and will remain so regardless of the National Weather Service's policy.

So, you may ask, why not let the National Weather Service compete? That might be a good idea if you want to pay more in taxes or if you want to shut off the innovation in meteorology that has made the United States the envy of the world in weather. The private sector in meteorology invented: Tornado warnings, color radar, Doppler radar displays, color newspaper weather packages, computerized, animated television weather displays, weather web sites, etc., etc., etc. The National Weather Service did not invent any of this. For the latest in innovation, go to www.stormhawk.com, which was developed by my company, WeatherData, Incorporated.

We believe a proper role of the federal government is to create infrastructure from which private industry can grow and prosper. To use an analogy, the federal government funds 90% (states 10%) of the interstate highway system but does not manufacture automobiles or run trucking companies. The highway infrastructure is there to allow commerce and the public at large to benefit.

We hope you will support the free and open exchange of data and support keeping and strengthening the current National Weather Service policy of focusing on its core mission (data, warnings and, possibly, forecast

did someone say "weather baloon"?

[Lanoitarus]

We all pay taxes (OK maybe not all of us) that support things like weather sattelites, weather baloons, remote weather stations, etc

Youre right, they CANT kill the NWS... then what would the air force claim had crashed at area 51 next time?

Comment on the NOAA site not just here.

[Irvu]

Any comments about the need for government data to be availible to the pulbic (or vice-versa if that's your view) should be sent to the comment page listed in the article. Discussion on /. is good but, in order for it to affect change, it can't stay limited to /.

Call to Action!

[Anonymous Coward]

Accuweather is mounting an industry email campaign to maintain their privileged status as conduit for Government information. Doesn't that deserve a counter-campaign? Following Accuweather's instructions, I sent the following email to the NOAA. (I even cc'd Barry Myers of Accuweather, per his request.) I suggest you do something similar.

To: 'fairweather@noaa.gov'

Cc: 'Conrad.C.Lautenbacher@noaa.gov'; 'DL.Johnson@noaa.gov'; 'devans@doc.gov'; 'myersb@accuweather.com'

Subject: Comment on NOAA's Proposed Policy on Partnerships in the Provision of Weather, Water, Climate and Related Environmental Information

I would like to comment on NOAA's Proposed Policy on Partnerships in the Provision of Weather, Water, Climate and Related Environmental Information. As a taxpaying citizen and Internet user, I support the proposed National Weather Service policy to provide free weather data on the Internet, in a variety of formats. I particularly like the idea of providing it as a "web service" (XML data feed). Your proposed policy is really quite innovative. My congratulations to you.

I am told that elements of the private weather sector (e.g. Accuweather) object to this. Apparently they don't like the idea that the American public could get this information directly from the government, instead of through them. Perhaps they fear that new competition could spring up. Competition is good for America. Giving everyone an equal chance is the American way. As a taxpayer, I have paid for this information already. Your duty to the citizens of this country is higher than your duty to any company that would like to stand between you and the public. Stay the course! The US Government is for the people, so increased public access to weather feeds is the right move. Providing the feeds in an open format, like XML, is the way to go.

Yes, the proposed policy is suitable for the activities of the National Weather Service in the area of weather, water, climate and related environmental information services. Yes, I believe the scope of the proposed policy should be expanded to include similar activities of NESDIS, OAR, and the National Ocean Service. Yes, I think adoption of the same or similar principles for other NOAA programs would be appropriate.

A lot of disinformation from Slashdot on this one

[cybervox]

First, Barry Myers is not the president of AccuWeather. Second, this request is not coming from AccuWeather but rather from the CWSA which includes all significant commercial weather companies including the Weather Channel and various broadcast meteorologists. (Barry Myers happens to be head of a committee there). Third, CWSA is not recommending the removal or discontinuation of anything, but rather requesting a review of the policy (read: law) currently in effect but is being ignored by government employees. Rather than offering to review the policy, the NWS has offered only to discontinue the policy entirely, giving them free range to spend your money on whatever they want... if this happens, expect to see (more) plasma screens in NWS offices and more inane projects like the Science Sphere (maybe a good idea if done by some rich kook but not if done with money taken out of my weekly check).