NOAA weather websites could go dark

You just can't make this stuff up...<br><br>Last week Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) introduced a bill that "would prohibit federal meteorologists from competing with companies such as AccuWeather and The Weather Channel, which offer their own forecasts through paid services and free ad-supported Web sites." The result of the bill, if passed, would be to force NOAA to remove day-to-day forecast information from its websites.<br><br>The Palm Beach Post has the story:<br><br>www.palmbeachpost.com/news/content/news/.../21/m1a_wx_0421.html

My favorite blogger, Josh Marshall , has this to say about it:<br><br>

Plenty of federal legislation these days boils down to this sort of rip-off of the public. But seldom is the equation so clear. <br><br>You paid for the data. Your tax dollars fund a massive apparatus of meteorological data collection for reasons ranging from agriculture to disaster safety to keeping airplanes in the air -- everything under the sun. You pay for it and this is just the feds making it available to you on a website. The cost of letting you access it must be minuscule compared to that of collecting it. Indeed, most of the data these other guys sell is stuff they get from the feds or fed-subsidized data collection.<br><br>So they're in the business of selling to you the information that your tax dollars already went into collecting. And apparently they add so little added value that they can't handle the competition when the National Weather Service just gives it away. Santorum wants to make these guys into some sort of information age tax farmers.

<br><br>This could be the wave of the future. How about extending this legislation to cover federally funded avalanche forecasting centers? Then I could start the Skoog Weather and Avalanche Center, siphon off the forecast information from NWAC (after it's been banned from the web) and start myself a tidy little business.   <br>

How 'bout all the mapping information provided from the gov't. Falls into the same boat.<br><br>The commercial sites should not exist if all they do is repeat the information they take from the gov't services. They can add value to that and therein make money and I believe that they largely do, especially for most of the individuals who don't want to pick through complicated web pages.<br><br>For maps, Natl geographic, Mapquest and the like certainly have found a way to add value to a gov't subsidized resource. And they are certainly worth it.<br><br>I wonder what brilliant interest group tipped Santorum on this petty issue. <br><br>Things like weather fall clearly into the public interest domain and safety. Can you imagine depending on the the Weather channel firing off the tornado warning systems in the midwest. There will be an alarm in every house (only for those who will subscribe to the service, of course)!<br><br>Alan

The brilliant interest group is for-profit weather providers, perhaps attracting sympathy from those of libertarian cast as well.<br>Thanks for post Lowell, saw this on TGR, also. It's worth shooting an e-mail to our Sens. if you're against this. Because it isn't about ANWR drilling, abortion, guns or taxes, it could be the kind of thing that slips under the radar, though with the blogosphere and places like this, that's less likely these days.

Thanks for bringing this to our attention - I'll definitely fire off a few notes. Though our Senators are unlikely to go along with Santorum on this, it never hurts to give a prod.

On something like this, it doesn't hurt to e-mail out to friends in other states, too, or to cold call senators from other states. I tried to call Transylvania rick yesterday but couldn't get through. I'll try again.