But there are probably thousands of things that cost only peanuts and aren't a priority. If you fix them all they add up to not peanuts and then you don't have any money left and you didn't even fix any priority tasks!
These forecasts directly affect everything from air travel to crop planting/harvesting to sea travel. They are critical for our economic (and citizen's) ongoing health.
And the internet, for better or worse, is the primary means of dissemination for the NOAA. Failing in this is failing at one of their greatest duties, IMO.
It’s got nothing to do with government supporting it’s self and 100% to do with legislated corruption that’s dependent on public officials playing their role.
And, it's been available to the public via the internet for at least two decades I know of at nws.noaa.gov (which now redirects to weather.gov).
NOAA's data is a stupidly valuable resource, even discounting the resellers.
[1]: https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=40.76031000000...
[2]: https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/data/global-forecast-system/access...
It’s the same issue where the IRS could in theory cheaply provide a user friendly tax prep software for ~1$ per taxpayer. However, tax prep software manufacturers have a massive incentive to avoid that. Further, they are going to lobby heavily for the issue which impacts themselves where most people don’t care about losing out in ~50$ per year.
Huh? Did you even look at the links I provided above? They are literally what your talking about. One is a free government run website that any person can use to get a weather forecast, the other is a free government run website where any person can download raw weather data and use any way they like. So no intermediates or companies required.
No. The second link isn’t something 99.9% of the general public will directly access. So in terms of directly communicating with the public without intermediaries it’s again useless to 99.9% of the population. The first link is useable but hardly designed to maximize views by the general public.
This isn’t some major expense, even 3% of their budget spent on communicating with the general public would easily cover several clean apps etc. Instead, it’s clear their largely a giant subsidy for private profit. Other government agencies charge for this kind of large scale data access by private companies to lower costs to taxpayers by removing subsidies.
So you admit that forecast.weather.gov is usable to the general public, but because it "doesn't maximize views" its some how invalidated? You said above that the public shouldn't need to use an intermediary to get a weather forecast and that's exactly what forecast.weather.gov is. And not only that but its faster and better than the for profit apps such as Accuweather, Weather.com, Weather Underground, etc.
> This isn’t some major expense, even 3% of their budget spent on communicating with the general public would easily cover several clean apps etc. Instead, it’s clear their largely a giant subsidy for private profit. Other government agencies charge for this kind of large scale data access by private companies to lower costs to taxpayers by removing subsidies.
3% of a multi billion dollar budget is a lot of money also why would they waste money on a "several clean apps" as you put it when they already have a working weather forecasting app and that money could be used to address issues like the bandwidth one described in the article above, or updating weather models? It sounds like you just want a fancy new app even though they already have a working one.
First I suggested these companies should be paying for API access. Alternatively, one app per device is multiple apps. It’s not about making weather.gov outcompete private companies, it’s about getting value for taxpayer money. People shouldn’t be watching adds or paying for apps that simply show them data they already paid for.
Hell their API’s are providing a longer forecast than the actual website. That’s silly.
forecast.weather.gov doesn't show longer than 7 day forecasts because forecasts beyond 7 days are not very accurate[1]. So why show something that has a 50% chance of being wrong?
And if your not able to use the raw data go to the NWS site which displays it in human friendly form: https://www.weather.gov/
On that note: thank you for providing those links!
I learned something new today, and I can think of some uses for that data.
Yeah probably true, I didn't post a source because I thought it was common knowledge which in retrospect I'm not sure why I thought that.
And I'm glad you enjoyed the links, when I first started looking into the raw NOAA data and PRISM[1] data it took a bit to figure out what to do with it. But I've found the GDAL library helpful for parsing various weather data formats, and there are a lot of them[2].
[1]: https://prism.oregonstate.edu/
[2]: https://gdal.org/
There's a name for this phenomenon! It's a cognitive bias called the "Curse of Knowledge": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge
In a nutshell, we instinctively assume others know what we know. This was probably true when we lived in small tribes on the Serengeti, but not so much in the global information age.
It takes practice, but you can grow the habit of always providing a little extra context without sounding patronizing, as well, at least in-person, a better sense for when people are following the conversation.
What helped me grow this skill was lots of pair-programming, because that daily pair rotation forces you to be really good at context-sharing on the quick.
Aside from point, weather station observations, most weather/climate data is gridded and you are right, GDAL provides lots of tools for processing and transforming gridded (raster) data products. DevelopmentSeed (no affiliation) creates some neat tools and I'd recommend following OSGEO[2] and the FOSS4G conference.
[0]: https://www.prism.oregonstate.edu/documents/pubs/1997appclim... [1]: https://github.com/developmentseed [2]: https://www.osgeo.org/
The majority of the data available to download is superfluous to most people hence why only a subset is shown on any weather app or website including forecast.weather.gov or Accuweather or whatever.
> It’s reasonable to separate providing data to providing data to the public
The NWS actually does provide visualizations for most of their data, and at this point I feel you don't know much about weather data/forecasting and are just looking to argue online. I provided a bunch of links below that allow curious people to look through American model data without having to use a company or having to program their own software. This list doesn't even include free to use apps/sites made by companies. American weather data is easy to access and view for free, Where as European model data is harder to access because you have to pay for it.
[1]: https://www.ready.noaa.gov/READY_animations.php
[2]: https://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/
[4]: https://prism.oregonstate.edu/
My original interest was displaying each days forecast vs what it had been the day before, but it turned out less interesting than I had expected. However, it’s easy to get sucked into this stuff.
Stolen from a parallel thread: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-06-14/trump-s-p...
Overall tho yes. Some large players take the data here , process it, and resell at larger value. Some might call it a value add. Accuweather is shit tho so dont ever go to them for anything
I do understand that the peanut gallery normally has very skewed, ignorant views of what complex agencies do. I also understand if you don't question, audit, and occasionally yell at them, they go bad and (at best) stop serving the people they're supposed to.