Yes, says the National Research Council, despite complaints by some private forecasting companies that the government is competing with them by giving away information they can sell.
From farming to transportation to energy, as much as half the U.S. economy is directly affected by weather, and 400 or more private companies have gone into business providing specialized forecasts, said John A. Armstrong, chairman of the committee that did the study.
The report Thursday noted that in recent years some companies have argued that the Weather Service is competing with companies by producing weather forecasts that the private sector can provide. In addition, some members of Congress have called on the Weather Service to privatize more services and avoid competition with private companies.
Under law the Weather Service is required to issue warnings of hazardous weather and to provide forecasts affecting air and marine travel.
Those forecasts are done with taxpayer money and should continue to be routinely made available to the public, said the council committee. The council is a branch of the National Academy of Sciences, an independent organization chartered by Congress to advise the government on scientific issues.
"Providing government information that the taxpayers have paid for to the taxpayers in a form they can understand and easily use is exactly what the government should be doing," said Edward R. Johnson, director of the office of strategic planning at the Weather Service.
The report urged the Weather Service to make all its data freely available, find ways to better cooperate with private industry and to set up procedures to discontinue any specifically prepared forecasts that private companies could do.
Mike Smith, founder of Wichita, Kan.-based WeatherData Inc., a private company dealing in weather risk management, said the report includes several things the private weather industry has been saying for years, especially unrestricted access to observational data.
Smith contended that some Weather Service data has been limited to internal and research use and should also be available to private forecasters.
"I don't think very many of us oppose them making forecasts for the public at large, but they put out products targeted to specific industries, we believe that's wrong," Smith said.
Many targeted forecasts, such as fruit frost warnings, have been discontinued by the weather services, but Smith said others continue to be issued by local offices.
Jeff Wimmer of Fleet/Compu-Weather in Hopewell Junction, N.Y., also found that a problem. He said it is hard to get people in local forecast offices to give up offering special services, such as sporting event forecasts, that private companies should be doing.
The report urged agency managers to balance respect for creativity at local offices with greater control over forecasts that may compete with the private sector, such as forecasts designed specifically for a ski resort.
Armstrong, a retired IBM vice president from Amherst, Mass., said he saw the report as a validation of an overall strong system involving the Weather Service, academic researchers and private forecasters.
"The occasional friction is a reasonable price to pay for the benefits to the nation," he said.
Wimmer estimated that 85 percent of the local weather information received by people in the United States, from newspapers or broadcasts, comes from private forecasting companies.
Most of those forecasts are developed from data supplied by the Weather Service and fine tuned by the companies.
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