Our Access To Noaa/nws Weather To Be Banned?

[DennisS]

We are already paying for the data, NOAA is using tax dollars to collect this data and is distributing it to the people who pay for it- the taxpayers.

Special interests want to become gatekeepers for this data and charge the taxpayers an additional fee to view it.

 

[christaylor]

signed and glady.

 

[Lil' Irish Temper]

Special interests want to become gatekeepers for this data and charge the taxpayers an additional fee to view it.

Just call me, and for 5 bucks I'll look out my window and tell you what the weather is.

Today : Sunny

Tommorrow: Possibly Crappy

 

[Don Burke]

(1) In general.--All data, information, guidance,
forecasts, and warnings received, collected, created, or
prepared by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
or the National Weather Service shall, to the maximum extent
practicable, be issued in real time, and without delay for
internal use, in a manner that ensures that all members of the
public have the opportunity for simultaneous and equal access
to such data, information, guidance, forecasts, and warnings.
(2) Mode of issuance.--Data, information, guidance,
forecasts, and warnings shall be issued under paragraph (1)
through a set of data portals designed for volume access by
commercial providers of products or services and by such other
mechanisms as the Secretary of Commerce considers appropriate
for purposes of that paragraph.

That is another interesting edit.

Well, at least you now include the entire text now and have shifted to creative bolding.

A better representation of what the first paragraph says would be:

(1) In general.--All data, information, guidance,
forecasts, and warnings received, collected, created, or
prepared by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
or the National Weather Service shall, to the maximum extent
practicable, be issued in real time, and without delay for
internal use, in a manner that ensures that all members of the
public have the opportunity for simultaneous and equal access
to such data, information, guidance, forecasts, and warnings.

There is no comma between "for" and "internal"

The following site competes with accuweather, weather.com, etc.. I believe the intent to stop the direct access of the public to this information via NWS websites. We instead will have to access a version of the same data generated by commercial services.

http://www.srh.noaa.gov/mfl/

http://www.srh.noaa.gov/shmrn.php?mz=amz650

I understand what you are saying. However, I have not found that in the wording of the bill.

I don't have the same level of confidence in the capacity and accuracy of commercial vendors to provide this information as compared to the NWS from past experience.

I have _no_ confidence in the commercial vendors. That does not seem to be an issue with this bill.

This part of the problems seems clear enough to me. Perhaps I am missing something?

I think so.

This part:

"in a manner that ensures that all members of the
public have the opportunity for simultaneous and equal access
to such data, information, guidance, forecasts, and warnings"

We are giving up something to allow ourselves the opportunity to pay for the similar content provided by the private sector perhaps of lessor quality.

I have not seen that. All I have seen is sentences and phrases chopped up to misrepresent the way the bill is written.

The reason this bill exists is still unclear to me.

It appears to offer no advantage to commercial vendors since all are entitled to "simultaneous and equal access", including the general public.

I do have three guesses.

1. Perhaps someone at NWS has been holding back data from anyone who is not a member of some sort of inner circle. Empire building is not uncommon in our government.

2. Perhaps the sponsor thinks the commercial vendors will make campaign contributions based on this bill. They might be that dumb.

3. Perhaps the bill was originally written to do what you are say and wording was added later which defeated the original intent. I have not looked for previous drafts.

 

[MXGratefulDiver]

2. Perhaps the sponsor thinks the commercial vendors will make campaign contributions based on this bill. They might be that dumb.

If you read the links I provided you would know that the commercial vendors have made campaign contributions to the sponsor of this bill.

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

 

[Don Burke]

If you read the links I provided you would know that the commercial vendors have made campaign contributions to the sponsor of this bill.

That would make guess #1 and #2 more likely to be true.

My bet would be on #1. NOAA _does_ delay weather data, supposedly for quality monitoring.

If the NWS is holding back AccuWeather and the Weather Channel to give their own weatherguessers time to look better, I would expect the private sector to try to do something about it.

The bill as written gives all an equal shot at the data.

 

[IlikeItwetPls]

Sounds like the private markets want the information free, then provide it to us for a fee, or make us go to their site and suffer through pop-ups and pop-unders to obtain the information we now get from a goverment site.

 

[RickI]

I received the following response from Florida Senator Bill Nelson in response to the letter that I filed through the website at:

https://secure.eff.org/site/Advocac...ovb1.app8a&page=UserAction&cmd=display&id=123

"Dear Mr. Iossi:

Thank you for contacting me regarding the National Weather Service.
The weather information provided on its website is invaluable and should
not be limited.

The National Weather service is a branch of the National
Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). It is the primary
source of weather data, forecasts, and warnings to the United States, and
provides information to television broadcasters and private meteorology companies to prepare their forecasts. During the hurricane season of 2004, when Florida was being battered by Hurricanes Charley, Frances, Ivan and Jeanne, the National Weather Service provided valuable information throughits website to the people of Florida to help them prepare for the disaster. During these hurricanes, The National Weather Service website received billions of hits, breaking a government record previously held by NASA sites after the Mars rover landing last spring.

Legislation has been introduced that would limit the ability of the
National Weather Service to offer its information to the general public.
S. 786, the National Weather Service Duties Act, introduced on April 14,
2005, would, among other things, prevent the National Weather Service from providing weather forecasts (with the exception of severe weather warnings) to the public on its website if a private company also is capable providing this information.

I oppose the National Weather Service Duties Act because it has a
variety of negative effects. This legislation would force consumers to get
on-line weather information from commercial websites that are cluttered
with pop-up ads and invasive solicitations, even though the consumer has
already paid for the taxpayer-funded National Weather Service. It would
prevent any National Weather Service forecaster from doing a one-on-one interview with a news reporter, and could even prevent the National Weather Service from providing any service on-line that is provided by a private vendor. I have written a letter to President Bush asking that he publicly oppose this attempt to push the weather service back to its pre-Internet era and limit the public's right to access government information.

I appreciate your informed policy suggestions. Please do not
hesitate to contact me again in the future."

http://billnelson.senate.gov/contact/index.cfm#email

 

[RickI]

So, is Senator Nelson deluded and/or distorting things or is this proposed legislation a potential threat to public access to important information as he describes? Many have already arrived at this conclusion of course.

 

[Bill51]

So, is Senator Nelson deluded and/or distorting things or is this proposed legislation a potential threat to public access to important information as he describes? Many have already arrived at this conclusion of course.

I’ve been on this project since 1992, and I have let Senator Nelson know on several occasions that he has no idea what he’s talking about and to stop supporting a socialist program that grows an unresponsive federal program into direct competition to innovative private enterprise.

While Senator Nelson and the opponents of this bill try to paint the private weather services as the evil bad guy wanting to limit their competition, they fail to point out that the Senators opposing the bill have their special interest groups too. Since this is not the forum to use some of the real world examples as they exist today, let me give a hypothetical example instead.

Say the Florida orange growers contribute to Senator Nelson’s campaign and get Nelson to require NOAA to start generating custom weather products designed to specifically meet the needs of the growers. This is accomplished by the Senator attaching a rider to a NOAA funding bill. Now, the apple growers in Washington state want NOAA to also generate custom weather products for their industry but they don’t have a friendly Senator in their pocket so they have to go to Accuweather or some other private service to BUY their weather reports.

One real world case that has been partially documented that shows this bill actually improves citizen weather services occurred a few years ago. A well liked NWS employee left NWS to work as the meteorologist at a local TV station and they advertised that they would have the fastest and most responsive forecasts so people should always tune into their station during bad weather. And sure enough, this station was beating all the other stations on air with breaking severe weather, and oddly enough they were also beating NWS to issuing of the forecasts and notifications. It was later discovered that the NWS was withholding public issuance of severe weather alerts for as long as 5 minutes while they notified their good buddy so he could be the first on the air with the reports. Fortunately no one ever died as a result of this little game.

While NOAA and NWS should be working to improve raw data collection and raw forecasting information, they’ve been spending their money developing pretty pictures and custom tailored forecasts for special interest groups rather than forcing those groups to go to the private companies. You know it’s bad when the FAA has to hire a private firm to develop aviation specific forecasts because NWS and NOAA are too busy creating custom forecasts for special interest groups. Further more, it’s more frustrating to know that the company hired by the FAA isn’t getting timely raw data to work from because NWS is busy doing forecasts for orange growers.

Since many of us are affected by weather at sea, I’d much rather know that as soon as NWS determines there’s a potential for bad weather they send out a text alert to my NOAA radio and I’ll go to Intellicast if I want to see a pretty picture of it after I’ve headed for shore.