How did Weather Data get Opened?

I did a postdoc at the National Institute of Standards and Technology-- part of the Department of Commerce. I really liked their attitude toward results and code generated there.

In a nutshell, their default position was-- The U.S. taxpayers already paid for this, so unless there's a compelling reason not to share it, we should. I remember somebody telling me that if you got a request for your code, you should ask, "Do you want that on a floppy or on a CD?" (yes, this was a while ago).

By that standard, in an ideal world it shouldn't seem so remarkable that the National Weather Service releases its data. We paid for the data collection and analysis, and the modeling, and the marginal cost of making those results public should be pretty small.

(By the way, the flip side of DoC's general position that their results belong to the public, is a level of scrutiny that you only work on things that the public sector can't or won't develop on its own.)

I am a meteorologist and depend on NWS data for much of what I do. To give you an idea how deep the disclosure goes, NWS even issues Area Forecast Discussions where lead forecasters discuss in scientific detail their reasons for the specific conditions they predict. Here's one from Upton, NY (covering Metro NYC).

http://kamala.cod.edu/ny/latest.fxus61.KOKX.html

Here's a similar discussion from the Hurricane Center

http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/text/refresh/MIATWDAT+shtml/100003.s...?