It’s astounding that we live in a time when this needs to be questioned, but with Trump’s recent NOAA appointment, there is actually some risk regarding what public feeds will continue to operate,
Barry Myers enriched himself by repackaging government-provided weather feeds and has long advocated that only private firms should be able to distribute forecasts based on those feeds to the public.
His argument is that it presents unfair competition if people can consume the forecasts from a government entity that has public funds and military support to deploy sensor networks, satellites, etc.
Ironically, he also holds the position that for any type of forecast, like hurricanes or severe weather, for which there could feasibly be legal culpability if an incorrect forecast leads to damage or loss of life, the government should be responsible for those warning systems and private weather corporations should not be required to provide data for these types of events.
The meteorologist made some very valid points, though. The Sinclair alert system isn’t clear and well-designed, unlike the long-standing NWS alert system.
Indirectly related, but it’s worth reading up on some of the political battles being fought in the US meteorological world at the moment.
An Accuweather executive, Barry Myers, was nominated to head the NOAA, which he’s spent years lobbying against to cut off public access to government weather data[0]. This story was featured in Michael Lewis’ latest book, The Fifth Risk, which documented instances where private companies are trying to block public access to various types of government data.
Private interests are materially altering reporting systems that have worked for years, and many professional meteorologists are becoming more concerned about this influence.
Weather Underground has a questionable track record with respect to foreclosing public access to weather data. Leadership at both the Weather Company and Accuweather are good friends with Trump. Shortly after Trump appointed Barry Myers head of NOAA (former CEO of Accuweather), NOAA dramatically curtailed its public data access in lieu of exclusive access to large companies like Weather Underground. For more on this, check out Michael Lewis's The Fifth Risk.
You might be interested to know that private sector weather forecasting firms have a long history of lobbying to prevent NOAA/NWS from building its own end user services and apps [0].
I agree that NWS [text] forecasts are usually the best, though it can be time consuming to digest them. Nate Silver's book [1] makes the interesting point that commercial forecasts almost always reduce the quality of the input data they're given from NOAA, but that part of this boils down to incentives: Nobody complains if you forecast a small chance of rain and it turns out to be sunny. The problem spot is in ruining someone's picnic. Hence, forecasts tend to bias heavily towards rain.
Barry Myers / Accuweather would love nothing more than to privatize all weather forecasting services, which means I, and my colleagues at SPC, would be out of a job
Jonathan Porter, a vice president and general manager at the private forecasting firm AccuWeather, warns that the agency’s proposed solution would harm the timeliness and accuracy of forecasts and severe weather warnings. He said the collection, processing and distribution of weather information are the agency’s “most important services.”
"Richard Hirn, an employee who represents the National Weather Service’s Employee Organization, told Bloomberg, “We fear that he [Barry Lee Myers] wants to turn the weather service into a taxpayer-funded subsidiary of AccuWeather.”"
They almost got their dream leader of NOAA when Trump appointed the head of AccuWeather, Barry Meyers, to lead NOAA. He withdrew his nomination for health reasons, but believes the government shouldn't provide any type of direct forecasts to the public. Michael Lewis has a good write up of this in his book The Fifth Risk.
> NOAA/NWS, for example, is extremely underfunded so if they had to privilege to buy it they probably couldn't come to an agreement to buy it. As a result, they can't use that data to improve the accuracy of alerts/warnings/forcasts, the same exact tools that the big weather companies make all their money from. It's a shit cycle and totally unfair IMO.
Huh? This is kind of an odd take for a few reasons. For starters, NOAA isn't "extremely underfunded"; with the possible exception of the current budgeting cycle, NOAA generally does pretty well and has strong bipartisan support. It could always use more money, but I wouldn't call it "underfunded.
The reason NOAA doesn't buy more data is because most of the available data has limited value. Personal weather stations have substantial quality issues and add almost no value in areas where we already have high-quality surface observations. We thin out and throw away a ton of surface observations already during the data assimilation process to initialize our forecast models anyways - data from aloft is far more valuable and impactful from a forecast impact perspective.
For what it's worth, few if any companies use proprietary observations to improve their forecasts. It's an open secret that the vast majority of companies out there are just applying proprietary statistical modeling / bias correction on top of publicly available data. Only a handful of companies actually have novel observations, and there's limited evidence it makes a significant difference in the forecast. At best, it can result in the way that those statistical corrections are applied to existing forecasts and ensembles - you can count on one hand the number of companies that actually run a vertically-integrated stack including data assimilation of proprietary observations and end-to-end numerical modeling.
That isn't to say there isn't unique value in the observations. It's just that the industry flagrantly misleads about how they use them.
TBF though, weather is like the worst example of rent seeking. The people that provide the most value to weather reporting and prediction is the federal government through the a National Weather Service. Private companies usually just repackage the free government provided reports, or they do some analysis on top of the government provided data.
That’s what has always made AccuWeather’s attempt to “privatize” (in reality stop having the government publicly publish forecasts, but continue the hard work of data collection) the weather service transparent rent seeking.
Given that government employees -- not to mention political appointees in transitory leadership positions -- are increasingly enjoined, mandated, and coerced to tow the party line (of the party in power), I'd pay a fair amount of attention to what the employees' union has to say about the matter. A voice with substantial political clout of its own, as well as some "anonym-ization" from individual comments subject to punishment including career termination.
There is separate reporting to the effect of staff becoming extremely stretched and overworked with the combination of hurricanes and fires that recently hit.
There are the reported proposed cuts to NOAA/NCAR budgets of 15+%. Cuts threatening to cripple current data collection efforts and ongoing innovation and developments in same. At a time when year-upon-year environmental and weather circumstances make increasingly clear that we need a better and more detailed understanding of what is going on (and of how we might deal with it).
U.S. Government weather services provide the backbone upon which private, commercial forecasting builds -- when they are not simply repackaging and repeating the government-provided information.
Those services are also critical to the ongoing management and execution of many commercial sectors within the U.S. economy. Agriculture, shipping, transport, even the "dirty old fossil fuel" sectors. Forecasting was wrong one one of our recent winters experiencing extreme cold spells particularly east of the Rocky Mountains, and propane supplies that had not been bolstered ran extremely low, leading to dramatic price hikes and shortages and considerable economic distress downstream not just to households but to businesses, i.e. other productive sectors.
These services are vital to a planful, productive execution of our economy.
But, as in many cases, the "government is bad" people refuse to acknowledge this.
Look at the EPA. Those folks now can't speak publicly without "official sign-off" of a political leadership. Politics before science.
Where present, set your sentiments about "unions" aside and look at why this may be the primary or only route via which you are hearing about problems, from the people in these institutions.
P.S. I forgot to mention: While I have mixed feelings about over-doing the "soft skills" aspects of the following, part of the head-count concern right now includes expanding efforts to translate data into communication that will make people take pro-active action to minimize their own risks. For a burgeoning emergency, making it clearer where may flood and what that will look like, so that, for example, people evacuate before they are stranded and at imminent physical risk necessitating risky and costly rescue. Reassessing and better communicating environmental risks for specific areas, to spur more pro-active zoning and other regulation as well as individual actions such as seeking flood insurance (before an uninsured person ends up needing a government-funded bail-out).
It was way worse than that. Back in 2005, Rick Santorum, the republican senator from AccuWeather's home state, introduced a bill that sought to privatize the National Weather Service's weather data and forecast products. AccuWeather's Founder and CEO, brothers Joel and Barry Myers, were among Santorum's biggest campaign donors, and they argued that the NWS forecast products were unfairly preventing them from making money on their similar products. Accuweather used the NWS data themselves, so they sought to prevent the NWS from publishing the data publicly, while preserving their own access to it.
Not coincidentally, Donald Trump has nominated Barry Meyers to lead the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
First, there's no way to compare the election stuff with this weather thing. Sometimes different things happen at the same time for different reasons.
>There exists a certain group of people that think private sector and The Market™ should handle many/most/all things
I think the Accuweather problem is worse, much worse. What has happened is that NOAA & NWS had been happily supplying data to..whoever..when some people decided to create a commercial service with the same data. Then they hired disgraced Jesus-freak Santorum to play lobbyist and try to kill the NOAA/NWS public services. Note that Accuweather is not going to fly their own satelites, they just want you to be locked out.[1]
That's right: if a private company decides to commercialize something the government is already doing, using the same government services that that government function is using, then the government should stop doing the thing and let the private company have the market.[2][3] This is a continuation of the Republican principle of privatizing profits and socializing risk, as well as colonizing publicly-funded resources.
NWS is an amazing resource for pre-trip planning for a variety of different people. I frequently consult it for weather forecasts prior to hiking. I'm not sure a company like Accuweather could provide me with access to such great forecasts or sensor data as NWS does given how reliant they are on NWS data themselves.
The other problem here is that Accuweather charges huge fees for access to their forecasts and I'm not sure that I, as a private citizen, could afford that. So my choices go from pay a little bit of tax to get access to high-quality, reliable weather forecasts and warnings, to being totally unable to get access to this information without paying exorbitant fee. Or alternatively just not knowing these things and having to pay higher insurance costs for my ignorance.
This is a really good example of how making government smaller makes a lot of peoples' lives much crappier.
Disturbing to see. We have the same issue in the US as well. Specifically some companies want NOAA/NWS to give their data to private companies who buy licenses and then the public can go to those companies (ex: AccuWeather). To me, weather (current observations or forecasts) is a public safety thing. Whether you're driving in the mountains and need an accurate forecast to make a go/no go decision or if you're a pilot and need to know freezing levels or other items. I've seen other things like aviation charts and terminal plates where private companies don't want the FAA to give it away for free, either (again: public safety - it should be free).
It's shit like this that gets people to go from "Capitalism needs tweaks" to "It is rotten to the core".
It should be completely obvious that the government has an interest in providing weather details to its citizens as a whole for planning and safety. Private citizens and companies are not entitled to markets, especially when it comes to public knowledge and safety!
If you read TFA though, the ambiguity you're citing doesn't seem to be the line they're waffling over.
The santorum bill the new NOAA chief supported in the past was pretty explicit about allowing _no_ competitive service, which would allow them to preclude even the most basic data sharing.
We've shown during the last N crises that american weather forecasting is already notably behind european models, and our lack of proper prediction and information dissemination has been very visible over the last decade of storm recoveries of varying success. I simply don't see the private sector incentives that would lead to fixing this, and see the competition argument as just another avenue to allow existing corporations to extract profit from even the most basic aspects of human safety.
Likely this is on purpose. I remember some congressman (PA's Rick Santorum?) trying to forbid the US Weather Service from sharing weather reports/forecasts so a partner of his would have a better market to sell the same service into.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/...
Barry Myers enriched himself by repackaging government-provided weather feeds and has long advocated that only private firms should be able to distribute forecasts based on those feeds to the public.
His argument is that it presents unfair competition if people can consume the forecasts from a government entity that has public funds and military support to deploy sensor networks, satellites, etc.
Ironically, he also holds the position that for any type of forecast, like hurricanes or severe weather, for which there could feasibly be legal culpability if an incorrect forecast leads to damage or loss of life, the government should be responsible for those warning systems and private weather corporations should not be required to provide data for these types of events.
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