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Would Trump privatize weather forecasting? What to know.
(www.washingtonpost.com)
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this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2024
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I was under the impression that basically every commercial weather station just copied the NWS's homework, which is a decidedly Republican arrangement: have the taxpayer foot the bill for the actual work while private interest reaps the benefits.
If the NWS goes away, they'll have to do their own meteorology. Maybe there's some way to spin some profit from that situation that I'm not degenerate enough to see yet, but it seems like it's against their own interests.
A private weather service would charge for API access to do research and can hide information that would cause embarrassment for the owner or their friends, such as climate change. Plus, weather is a funny thing in societies all over the world: of something unexpected happens anyone can just blame the random ess of weather. But if a forecast is buried and a tornado warning doesn't go out, the info for who made that decision is hidden too. The people who died to a tornado or flooding or weather event will get no justice to private negligence.
Private weather will also provide a long term block for detailed weather analysis and cause weather sciences to stumble, of not stop development entirely.
The right don't want scientists, they want technicians who adjust readouts.
It's similar in the UK. The UK has a public weather service (the Met Office) and there are also private services that use the data from the Met Office. The private services cut corners with their forecasting software and have lower-skilled forecasters, and as a result, provide measurably worse forecasts. If you're making life-and-limb decisions based on forecasts such as which roads to close due to ice, you'd better have access to the best possible forecasts that exist, otherwise people will die.