NOAA's public weather data powers the local forecasts on your phone and TV

https://theconversation.com/noaas-vast-public-weather-data-powers-the-local-forecasts-on-your-phone-and-tv-a-private-company-alone-couldnt-match-it-249451

by rntn • 1 year ago

188 79 1 year ago

theconversation.com

jmclnx2• 1 year ago

Which is why NOAA needs to be left alone. But Trump and maybe the GOP wants to privatize NOAA, which would be a disaster for the US.

lotsofpulp2• 1 year ago

Already tried once 7 years ago:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Lee_Myers

WarOnPrivacy• 1 year ago

We don't seem to have any lesson-learning folks in play.

pridkett• 1 year ago

Rick Santorum tried doing this repeatedly starting in 2005. It was one of personal crusades in the Senate.

https://www.politico.com/story/2012/01/7-year-old-attack-on-...

mmooss2• 1 year ago

Cui bono?

One benefit to some is the continued assault on sources of truth: Academics, everyone even arguably left-wing, news media, science, now we lack a source of truth on weather. More generally, the idea of an apoltical, non-profit source of truth is actively denied and any example is destroyed. The CIA and FBI are other examples.

Without a source of truth, how can any public agreement or action form? All information becomes social media. Notice who controls that too: Meta, X, and also Bytedance will be beholden to the same people destroying all else.

throw0101d5• 1 year ago

Cui bono?

Barry Myers of AccuWeather for one: they charge for their services. See "The Plan to Privatize Weather Forecasts":

* https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/fact-checking-what-pro...

* http://archive.is/https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archiv...

* https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/environment/...

John Oliver did a story about this in 2019 (Trump 1.0):

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMGn9T37eR8

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Lee_Myers#Nomination_to_...

If NOAA discontinues free weather forecasts, everyone (news, websites, apps) will have to pay someone to get them.

beowulfey• 1 year ago

Honestly, I will never pay for a weather service. If I have to keep an umbrella in my bag, so be it. If it means an unexpected snow day, oh well.

Other services that depend upon weather will pass those fees down to me anyway, no reason to pay for it twice.

jisnsm• 1 year ago

I see nothing wrong with private entities having to pay for weather forecasts instead of leeching off the taxpayers.

user39393824• 1 year ago

I’d be ok with looking to streamline NOAA, double check budgets etc, but just disbanding it no.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF• 1 year ago

I need to trim my fingernails but I am not going to let a crazed axe murderer in my house to do so

imajoke2• 1 year ago

Nothing about NOAA makes a dent in the federal deficit. You're thinking of entitlements (which are appropriated by Congress, a co-equal branch of government that makes laws (lest you forgot)), and defense spending.

user39393824• 1 year ago

I’m aware of the size of NOAA, it’s still tax dollars. If they were spending $10k that could be $8k it’s still tax dollars. That would apply to any federal agency.

jonstewart2• 1 year ago

Thank you for your service, President 3939382! It’s an honor to serve in your benevolent administration.

user39393824• 1 year ago

Your country thanks you.

lotsofpulp2• 1 year ago

You can double the NOAA budget and still not make any difference.

https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...

willis936• 1 year ago

Or you could halve it and cost society tens of billions in second order effects.

WorkerBee28474• 1 year ago

It's will never be disbanded. The nation will always need an in-house weather service for the military advantage that provides.

dylan6044• 1 year ago

Never is a strong word to toss around with the current administration.

There's been a big push to make NOAA go away so that private companies like AccuWeather be the one everyone turns to for their data. AccuWeather has been pushing for this for a long time--even before Trump's first term. We'll see how big their donations are perceived by how gutted NOAA becomes. As for military, the Air Force has it's own weather teams as well. I'd assume others do as well.

NOAA is ripe for President Musk's axe if Uncle Trump says so

imglorp• 1 year ago

It's also a critical part of the national air transport system -- nothing flies without a METAR -- not to mention maritime, agriculture, commerce, etc.

Some things are just reliable, public infrastructure like roads or electricity that society finances one way or another. Anyone aiming to damage public infrastructure is trying to end the country.

yongjik• 1 year ago

I don't think this administration even cares about America's military advantage. If they did, they wouldn't have started the term by casually insulting the sovereignty of two NATO allies.

GolfPopper• 1 year ago

I'm extremely skeptical of the entire premise of DOGE. There are vast changes being made to very large organizations, in very short timespans, with the claim that those making them know what they're doing. But the timespans in question - days to weeks at most - mean that there's no time to review anything. So those making changes do not, cannot, be making decisions based on reviews of available evidence, because they haven't given themselves time to review the evidence. Which in turn means that when they claim they do, they're either delusional or lying.

Chesterton's Fence [1] would also seem to apply here, but I mostly think it's not even getting that far. DOGE isn't doing an audit (if it was, there would be auditors, not talented young programmers) and then taking action. DOGE is executing already planned actions, while pretending to be an audit, and helping itself to a great deal of access and data along the way.

1. https://theknowledge.io/chestertons-fence-explained/

hypeatei• 1 year ago

DOGE seems to be treating this like a culling in a private company but you can't do that. It's completely normal for private businesses to fail but we rely on the government as a safety net (e.g. social security, FDIC, etc..) so failure there is catastrophic.

dylan6044• 1 year ago

we rely on the government as a safety net

This is the issue though. They think the safety net is the problem.

mrguyorama2• 1 year ago

Their ideology is that safety nets let useless people take up too many resources.

pfd1986• 1 year ago

The plan seems to be to (1) "RAGE: Retire All Government Employees (...), take over the United States government and gut the federal bureaucracy. Then, replace civil servants with political loyalists"

So in essence, they think these short term problems can be reversed once the pawns are replaced.

(1) https://www.thenerdreich.com/reboot-elon-musk-ceo-dictator-d...

stuaxo• 1 year ago

I'm not sure they care about the problems solved. The model is probably closer to what happened to Russia after the Soviet Union collapsed.

jonstewart2• 1 year ago

It should be noted… it’s illegal to do that.

imajoke2• 1 year ago

You should be skeptical, because Musk and the Musk Youth are precipitating 1-3 constitutional crises daily. And then they ignore federal judges who tell them to stop their coup.

hnburnsy4• 1 year ago

This feels like a strawman, I haven't seen any proposal to eliminate or privatize NOAA. Just checking it looks like the un-avowed Project 2025 suggested commercializing the data which seems smart to me. Why let all these billion dollar weather channels, media companies, and apps ride on NOAA's free data? Non-commercial use of the data could still remain free.

drivingmenuts2• 1 year ago

Well, there this:

https://www.fastcompany.com/91274927/trump-wants-to-dismantl...

I'm sure Elon will provide AI-generated weather reports. Someday. Might be from Mars, but we won't have to deal with the smallest uniformed service.

hnburnsy4• 1 year ago

Fast Company, quoting Project 2025, really.

Anyhoo, PBS said of the un-avowed Project 2025...

Project 2025 would not outright end the National Weather Service. It says the agency “should focus on its data-gathering services,” and “should fully commercialize its forecasting operations.”

2OEH8eoCRo02• 1 year ago

Yep. NOAA is the source of all the weather data that all of your weather apps and TV stations use.

acomjean• 1 year ago

I remember seeing "weather.gov" on one of the monitors of a local tv news station. (they had kind of an open newsroom).

Weather.gov is a antidote from the add sponsored mess that weather websites are. Of course I suspect most people use phone apps now. But they have a lot of information on those pages, including weather discussions.

I follow this because my startup had to normalize for weather so we needed weather information. We went to "weatherunderground" (a play on a 60s era group perhaps?) and paid some money to get that weather data. They got bought by weathercompany/IBM. I had a developer account and could pull hourly weather information (I had grand plans to compare predictions vs actual) that got axed

weather.gov was always there. They don't have an api, but I love their weather graph which lets you look at a bunch of weather over the next couple days (and includes sunset and sunrise). Its very fast to read after a few days.

eg https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=42.3774&lon=-7...

Forecast discussion: https://forecast.weather.gov/product.php?site=NWS&issuedby=b...

sjsdaiuasgdia• 1 year ago

weather.gov is so good! Between weather.gov and noaa.gov there is an absolutely incredible amount of information available.

I'm a big fan the GOES viewer: https://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/goes/conus.php?sat=G16

2OEH8eoCRo02• 1 year ago

I love weather.gov and use it daily- even on my phone.

TYPE_FASTER• 1 year ago

It looks like there is an API for weather.gov now: https://www.weather.gov/documentation/services-web-api

I really appreciate how the NWS products make it easy to create custom widgets that you can embed in a webpage.

smfjaw• 1 year ago

NOAA is fantastic, I was alpine climbing in the very bottom of south america near El Chalten and NOAA is pretty much the only place to get a reliable forecast down there. Fantastic service.

jmyeet• 1 year ago

What we're seeing here is the dismantling of necessary and useful government functions by people who have no idea about the consequences of what they're doing.

I can't wait for them to come for GPS (run by DoD). All these people want to do is replace these government functions with a worse and more expensive private alternative but hey, someone gets to rent-seek massive profits, so that's OK. It's also a lesson in how for many things, them being run by a government entity is the best alternative.

If you want to see actual waste, how about a current sitting Senator and former Florida governor who, at the time, run a company that got the largest fine in history for defrauding Medicare to the tune of $1.7 billion [1], something for which nobody faced criminal prosecution.

[1] https://www.factcheck.org/2014/06/floridas-medicare-fraud-fl...

gdubs• 1 year ago

NOAA is a crown jewel of the American experiment. Agencies like this don't exist to turn a profit — they are there to serve the public interest.

throw0101d5• 1 year ago

This was all published ahead of time, and any one voting to Trump "should" have been aware this is was the plan:

The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories.

* https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_CHA...

HocusLocus3• 1 year ago

Do you have any other sources? Project 2025 is neither authored nor endorsed by Trump. It was a Heritage Foundation conservative romper room where no idea was a bad idea, its members contributing for pats on the head, which is why it's 900 pages long.

It's Wikipedia 'Talk' page is more interesting reading than the article itself.

throw0101d5• 1 year ago

[…] nor endorsed by Trump. […]

The non-endorsement by Trump was a lie:

He has also played a significant role in Project 2025, an initiative led by the Heritage Foundation that aims to advance conservative, right-wing policies and reshape the federal government.[3] […] In May 2024, Russell Vought was named policy director of the Republican National Committee platform committee.[83] The Center for Renewing America (CRA), founded by Vought, is on Project 2025's advisory board.[84] CRA drafted executive orders, regulations, and memos that could have laid the groundwork for rapid action on Trump's plans when he won.[85] The CRA identified Christian Nationalism as one of the top priorities for the second Trump term.[15] Vought claimed that Trump blessed the CRA, and that his effort to distance himself from Project 2025 was just politics.[85]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_Vought

Vought has been labelled as the 'architect' of Project 2025, and has been appointed as the director of the OMB.

"Senate confirms Project 2025 co-author as Trump budget chief"

* https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clykpgxm4n7o

evanjrowley• 1 year ago

When people talk abouth NOAA, they're usually referring to the sub-agency National Weather Service (NWS).

As someone who has had experience at NOAA, I'd like to point out that the way they manage information security seems really wasteful. All of the tools they need are present in the environment, but there has not been sufficient political will for the various sub-agencies to work together and integrate them holistically. The net effect is duplication of half-baked cyber security functions across NOAA. The line items are purchased but the sub-agencies lack the man-power to effectively implement what's possible because government processes are too much overhead. It doesn't help that their FISMA-reportable "systems" are their sub-agencies and not actual systems. The 'mangerial class' that Republicans have rallied against during the 2024 election is sucking the lifeblood out of NOAA's IT operations.

NOAA's public weather data powers the local forecasts on your phone and TV

Related Stories