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Comment by PostOnce | Hacker News Reader

New Zealanders pay taxes for a weather agency and a separate climate agency, neither of which provides weather local for most farms (one farm client of my agtech automation business is an hour from town; the weather report only applies to town).

Additionally, the weather service is a "state owned enterprise" expected to turn a profit.

So everyone who needs farm weather uses yr.no

After covid, I'm going to go talk to some politicians about our weather forecasting problem.

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I'm somewhat surprised. The National Weather Service in the US has a website: https://weather.gov. There is a radar map https://radar.weather.gov/ and forecasts https://digital.weather.gov.

They also publish the data for free, such as map layers/radar https://opengeo.ncep.noaa.gov/geoserver/www/index.html or the weather forecasts https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/products/weather-climate-models/na...

In the past The Weather Channel lobbied to get public access shut down but failed but most people selling weather data compete by building improved forecasts, local knowledge, etc on top of NWS data. It greatly lowers the barrier to entry for anyone wanting to get into the space.

Commonwealth countries also have something called "crown copyright" unlike the US putting all tax-funded works in the public domain.

I still don't really understand it.

I believe it was Accuweather (sic) and Rick Santorum.

I have a weather app on Android and, as a New Zealander, wanted to include NZ data. MetService made it difficult and costly. When I asked how much for radar data, they essentially asked how much the app earned. I wrote to MP Megan Woods about this but never got a reply. Philip Duncan of WeatherWatch in NZ has fought this in the past. There is also a PriceWaterhouseCooper report on MetService:

https://www.mbie.govt.nz/assets/5b3b826f79/weather-permittin...

My weather app has five weather models that cover NZ include a high resolution model from Expedition Marine, an NZ based meteorologist. I hope to bring model farming related weather data in the future.

Is weather forecast enough for agtech business. Until recently I was in that industry and apparently the local weather station was the way to go for accurate predictions. we have a few of these hardware companies here in Europe and always wondered why this was necessary, knowing that we have some of the most accurate predictions here in central europe. How is it for you in NZ?

It's not that my business is weather, it's that I can't do certain things in the rain, and not being able to work out a schedule is a big problem. It can cost people and businesses a lot of money. It can cost the country a lot of lost tax revenue.

If yr.no weren't providing us free weather, we'd get a lot less done, because we wouldn't know the weather 2 or 3 days in advance because our forecasters do not tell us what is happening a 45 minute drive up a valley from here.

> After covid

what do you mean? are there still restrictions in NZ?

Maskless face-to-face meetings are more effective than masked ones, in my opinion. Nevermind more effective than email or a phone call. I'd like to meet when I can have a frank discussion without a mask on so that we can gauge one another's sincerity and receptiveness to an idea.

Why can't you have a maskless face-to-face meeting? I'm having maskless face-to-face meetings in Auckland all the time.

Well, my coworker's wife wound up in the hospital because he brought covid home, and I don't want mine to. I wear a mask, he never did. Case load hasn't dropped much yet.

Also, even if I didn't care, there's no guarantee any of the politicians will meet me maskless yet.

Who are you planning to talk to? A National MP will be in favour of just selling it and then bungle the IPO returning very little to the government. A Labour MP will propose opening it up but then get distracted trying to pass other legislation that nobody wants.

That aside you might make some progress talking to the Greens if you framed it as an environmental issue.

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