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GCN Home > 12/13/04 issue

New NOAA information policy stirs debate

By Joab Jackson, GCN Staff

Agency grapples with role in disseminating forecasts, alerts

To what extent should agencies make their data available to the public, and how much should they rely on the private sector to do the job for them?

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is now grappling with this issue when it comes to publishing its weather forecasts and alerts.

Earlier this month, NOAA issued a policy that it hopes will clarify how it evaluates new technologies for distributing weather-related information. A draft of the policy, along with new Web technologies the agency is testing, has spurred debate within commercial media outlets and public advocacy groups.

Commercial providers of weather information worry that NOAA will duplicate industry services and compete with them at taxpayer expense. Advocacy groups fret that NOAA’s material might be given exclusively to media companies, which could resell the information to the public or make it available through advertisement-supported conduits.

“The public should not have to pay twice for weather information,” said Ari Schwartz, an analyst at the Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington.

Adding more fuel to the fire, low-cost technologies have inflamed the debate.

Although NOAA’s National Weather Service is charged with making its weather information available to the public, the agency has traditionally left the bulk of the job to commercial media, such as TV networks and newspapers that get the data from NOAA satellite feeds, teletypes and other sources.

But as new technologies have become available, NOAA has dabbled in services that directly reach the public, most notably its own Web portal, weather.gov. The agency estimates that its Web sites get about 6 million visitors a day. NOAA is also testing e-mail, a wireless access protocol for mobile phones and a Web service using Extensible Markup Language.

Such forays worry commercial providers, who fear losing revenue-generating traffic to the government services, said John Toohey-Morales, president of the National Council of Industrial Meteorologists.

“Private-sector entities have invested millions in new convenient ways for the general public to consume weather information,” Toohey-Morales said. “When the government competes with the private sector, then what incentive is there for the private sector to provide these innovations?”

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