NOAA: File is deleted by executive order [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

NOAA: File is deleted by executive order [pdf]

noaa.gov

60 pointspaulgb19 comments

To any who are interested, many other countries provide high quality weather data products (paid and free), and so does ECMWF at the European (not just EU) level. ECMWF’s data is available directly from them or via various member countries national agencies. My knowledge is Eurocentric but I suspect that China, Japan and others also have useful datasets.

I don’t work in the field, but I have visited ECMWF and they’re the real deal.

https://www.ecmwf.int/en/forecasts/datasets/open-data

https://www.met.no/en/free-meteorological-data/Data-and-prod...

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/services/data

I was going to ask about that. I download local conditions from NOAA's ftp site and wanted find other free sites for that data "just in case".

Thanks

You should fully expect all NOAA data products to disappear. If only I had a few petabytes of spare storage.

Why should the government give that out to the paying public, when one of trumps friends could make a buck selling it to you?

The next obvious step is to dismantle NOAA altogether, because that could be provided by the private market.

During his last administration, Trump nominated Barry Myers to head NOAA. Myers lobbied for AccuWeather, attempting to prevent NOAA from publishing data that would compete with AccuWeather. He was also notable for not having a scientific background. (He ultimately withdrew.)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Lee_Myers

Which I think he deserves credit. Hopefully that came from the heart and he knew that was a bad direction to go.

I don’t know if you’ve read Project 2025, but this is the current plan .. to break up NOAA and privatize and paywall weather data (sell to Accuweather)

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/fact-checking-what-pro...

I was probably a bit too quick on the trigger here.

Why actually shut down NOAA? Let NOAA do the heavy lifting of producing the data products - at taxpayers expense, then let Accuweather have an exclusive contract to sell that data - with private profits.

That sounds much better. So they don't necessarily want to shut down all the government departments.

Yet they are paying for it already and now they get to pay again.

https://web.archive.org/web/20250108130906/https://www.noaa....

Looking at the archived document makes it pretty obvious it was removed because it mentions the radar might be useful in studying long term climate trends, and anything to do with climate change is presumably now verboten. I say presumably because I can't find the specific executive order out of the dozens so far that would prohibit this, but it's hard to imagine what else in that document would have run afoul of the censors.

The “deleted” PDF was created on 2025-01-22T06:14:08-05:00, which should reduce the candidate executive orders somewhat. You could also email the author: https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/contact/salim-abddeen

I just wish that it were possible to at least ask for empathy. I'd like to be able to say, "Imagine Biden or Harris had done this. What would your reaction be?"

It's not really possible to get a meaningful answer to that question. Even if I accepted that an answer was honest I'm not sure I could accept it as accurate. Counterfactuals always have an element of "all things being equal" but things are never equal.

Still... You can see why I think they'd be calling for treason trials. And so I'm not sure what they expect me to be doing at this moment.

In some ways the current narrative is that there are American government employees who are unpatriotic. They have harmful spiritual direction and if given power in government positions they will poison society.

And they need to be rooted out from judge positions, education, and basically all matters of importance in society.

This is the same rhetoric being used by the current administration

I would have said that once again, the neoliberal 'center' sold out to the lobbies for a quick buck.

Honestly I am surprised USians didn't had to pay (cash or private data) for this kind of public data before trump, because well, neoliberals in both party, but this seems to be egregious. How can the president remove non army-related public data? I hope at least a judge had a say in this (and that he asked a few millions).

The judges haven't had a say. That will happen, eventually. The judicial system isn't designed to cope with this "shock and awe" approach. Many things will never reach a judge because they've also fired the people who would have the authority to do so. Even those that do will often be too late.

For context, the file is linked from here: https://www.weather.gov/news/241908-weather-radars

I see a private sector pay to have Weather service in our future.

it is here, too https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Radar_Next_Program_O...

but I don't get it: why was it removed?

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