Rough WeatherRough Weather

Extreme weather makes weather data extremely valuable. No sooner did Hurricane Dennis slam the Gulf Coast two weeks ago than Hurricane Emily began stirring. Driving rain, 140-mph winds, crushing waves--those and other daily threats, and promises of sunshine, too, cause millions of people to keep close tabs on what's headed their way.

The National Weather Service is the primary collector of weather-related data in the United States, with scientifically generated databases that can affect everything from the price of oil to the number of people injured in a storm. But the government agency finds itself in a developing storm of another kind--a debate over its role as a distributor of publicly funded data and the ramifications of its actions on the private sector.

For more than 100 years, the National Weather Service and its precursor agencies have released data that has found its way to the consuming public, through telegraph dispatches originally and Web sites and cable outlets more recently. In 1991, the National Weather Service adopted a policy of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, its parent organization, that prevented it from competing with private-sector distributors of weather information. As a result, most of us get our weather information not from the National Weather Service but from other sources.

But that restriction was lifted in December when the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration repealed its noncompete policy, based on recommendations from the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences. In effect, the change lets the National Weather Service bypass private-sector companies by making its information more accessible to individuals and organizations.

And the National Weather Service has used some of the most up-to-date approaches to do this. In December, it began making data in its National Digital Forecast Database available in XML format. That information can also be accessed as RSS feeds or using a mobile device pointed to certain government Web sites.

The changes, however, pose a threat to some companies in the weather business and have raised questions over how National Weather Service data is handled. In April, U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., introduced the National Weather Services Duties Act of 2005 (S. 786) in an attempt to clarify the responsibilities of the federal agency. Since then, the debate hasn't subsided--and the National Weather Service continues to launch new services. Last month, it introduced Spanish-language forecasts and alerts on its Web sites.

But critics have questioned the proposed legislation from the outset. "The bill is designed to be private-industry friendly," says Jeff Masters, director of meteorology for the Weather Underground Inc., which operates a Web site of weather information. "I think it was written as a favor for large weather providers." Masters worries the bill might force his company to purchase weather information from a larger commercial source such as AccuWeather Inc., rather than get it directly from the National Weather Service.

The issue of "competition" between the government's weather agency and public companies was already festering. In June 2003, Sens. Santorum and Conrad Burns, R-Mt., wrote a letter to the Office of Management and Budget, complaining about "chronic and recurring encroachment on the private sector" by the National Weather Service. They charged the agency with pointing Web traffic to preferred sites and providing information via wireless devices "after representing to the private sector that it would not engage in such a practice."

The Commercial Weather Service Association, an industry trade group, is hotter than the Arizona sun. President Steven Root, in an E-mail interview, charges the National Weather Service with "making itself a commercial competitor to America's private weather industry, using taxpayer money to duplicate products and services already freely available to the public" through companies such as AccuWeather, WeatherBank, and the Weather Channel.

Weather Channel executive VP of meteorology Raymond Ban, like many others in the private sector, agrees that the relationship between the government and the commercial weather industry needs to be rethought in keeping with the recommendations of the National Research Council, but he doesn't believe the Santorum bill is the answer. "As the private sector has continued to grow and evolve, all of a sudden the boundaries that seemed to be very comfortable and very well-suited 50 years ago aren't working anymore," he says. "Now the private sector has become very competent at performing a lot of things that used to be very well-suited for the public sector." The National Weather Service is mostly silent on the issue. As a government agency, it's unable to comment about proposed legislation that might affect it. But the National Weather Service Employees Organization is snapping back. Richard Hirn, general counsel for the group, charges in a letter to U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., that the Santorum bill "would prohibit the National Weather Service from providing any service, including marine, public, and aviation forecasts (other than severe weather warnings), to either the public, the media, academia, or state and local emergency-management officials if private-sector weather companies are or could provide a similar service for a fee."

Commercial weather providers typically augment the National Weather Service data they get with data from other sources. The Weather Underground adds current-condition data--temperatures, precipitation, visibility--from weather stations maintained by the Federal Aviation Administration and international data from automated stations in 12,000 cities. The Weather Underground, with customers including Google, Knight Ridder, and the San Francisco Chronicle, sells its content for $500 to $10,000 a week.

It's tempting to assume that the government's effort to make weather data more accessible has improved public safety. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported in July that there had been no tornado fatalities since March, a first during this period since record keeping began in 1950. But Dan McCarthy, a meteorologist with the administration's Storm Prediction Center, suggests luck, in the form of a series of weak tornadoes, probably has more to do with it.

Still, better science and technology shouldn't be discounted. The National Weather Service over the last five years has doubled the warning lead time for tornados to approximately 12 minutes. And forecast accuracy continues to improve.

The Weather Channel's Ban believes improved information availability has saved money and lives. "Anecdotally, we know that the accuracy today of a five-day prediction is just about the same as what a three-day prediction was 20 years ago," he says. Five days before Hurricane Dennis' landfall, predictions were that the western Florida panhandle would be its landing spot, which proved accurate. "Forty or 50 years ago, that kind of insight was not available," Ban says.

It's hard to pin a dollar value on the data collected by the National Weather Service, but there's little doubt that timely information about cold spells and stormy skies has far-reaching implications. Introducing his bill before the Senate in April, Santorum argued regulation was needed because weather data might be used to unfair advantage in weather futures markets, agriculture and energy markets, and other business areas influenced by government weather forecasts.

Everyone seems to agree with the ostensible goal of the bill, which is "to make all data and information that the public has already paid for available in real time," says Joel Myers, founder and president of AccuWeather and a campaign contributor to Santorum. But there's disagreement about whether the text of the proposed legislation will function as advertised. The bill specifies that National Weather Service data be issued "through a set of data portals designed for volume access by commercial providers of products or services." It also directs the secretary of commerce to determine other methods for publishing weather data, but with the caveat that the secretary not assist others in providing a product or service "that is or could be provided by the private sector," with a few exceptions, including severe-weather forecasts.

That kind of language is a red flag to some who say ambiguities in the bill could leave room for new restrictions to be placed on National Weather Service data. "The bill is poorly drafted because, after reading it several times, I'm not at all clear as to exactly what information the [National Weather Service] would be prohibited from releasing to the public," David Moran, assistant professor of law at Wayne State University, says via E-mail.

With the exception of the Postal Service, the government typically avoids competing with the private sector. But what's happening with weather data is that some companies are making "an industry out of government assets," says Richard Griffin, a partner at Texas law firm Jackson Walker, who contends that taxpayer-funded weather data should be equally available to everyone.

Efforts to control public information that profits the private sector aren't new. Commercial providers of patent and trademark information opposed making the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office database available online, a fight they lost in 1998. And in 1993, the Securities and Exchange Commission made its Electronic Data Gathering and Retrieval System available online free of charge. Those following Santorum's bill note it hasn't received much support, but Dan Sobien, VP of the National Weather Service Employees Organization, believes the bill has a good chance of becoming law if it gets attached to other legislation. A spokesman for Santorum says the bill awaits further action in committee and that there are no plans to attach it to other legislation.

This fall there will be more focus on an alternative piece of legislation, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Act (H.R. 50), based on the fact that it already has come through the House Science Committee, the Weather Channel's Ban says. H.R. 50 and a possible Senate version will more directly address the recommendations of the National Academy of Sciences on redefining the role of the National Weather Service in relation to the private sector, he says.

Either way, the storm clouds are already forming.