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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?"
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?
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
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 ;).
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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.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
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?
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...
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).
At the bottom of the endless pile of paper work which characterizes all regulation lies a gun.
Alan Greenspan
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?
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.