What's a weather forecast worth?
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Adrian mar, what is an APP on your phone that you use every single .

day like besides of the text messaging .

APP up or like Candy crash?

Er, whatever I would have to say the weather at is like the first thing that I open in the morning.

Me too. Now here's another question. Do you ever think about where the weather forecast on your phone comes from?

You know, until very, very recently, I had not thought about this at all. I just assumed, like somebody was beaming IT to me from a satellite somewhere.

Yeah, I never really thought about this either until I started using a specific weather APP on my phone, yet lets me tagle between almost a dozen forecasting sources and confession. Sometimes if i'm hoping for A T giler forecast, i'll just shower on in the APP .

until I get the forecast that I want you like or it's going to rain .

today or is IT or is IT.

I guess this just goes to show how much access we have to weather information these days. Weather forecasting has gotten a lot more accurate in the last few decades. It's a multi billion dollar industry. Companies from tech startups to huge corporations are competing to produce more sophisticated and precise forecast.

This kind of scientific arms race is bringing to the four long simmering tensions in the metrology community. Attention is over how weather data should flow between the government and private companies and at what Price. This is the indicator from planet money.

I'm willing wrong, and I may dream mah today in the show. How much is an accurate weather forecast worth? Who should pay for IT and who should benefit? This message .

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government has officially been in the weather business since eighteen seventy. That's when congress created a national weather bureau to collect data and make forecasts. Today, that office is known as the national weather service, is part of an agency called the national oceanic and atmosphere ic administration.

commonly referred to as noa, and the national weather service is the main source of weather data forecasts and warnings in the U. S. Its job is to protect life and property, and that means making weather data univerSally available to everyone as a public service. So like when you see the local weather forecast on the news, for example, there is a good chance that the underlying data comes from the government.

And then there are lots of businesses that are taking that data, slicing and dicing IT and selling IT onward. Keh cider is a professor of climate science at the college of the holy cross, and he's also a senior policy adviser at the american meteorological society.

To twenty years ago there, there were a few government agencies that worked on whether and there were a fairly well known list of private sector companies, any of us could sit down with a piece of paper and write down to twenty main companies. And now that the private sector is vast and IT goes everything from very, very tiny one or two person companies up, two companies like microsoft, google.

private companies like these take data from noa and the national weather service. They put their own spin on IT. Say, by applying proper teary computer models, they can then sell specialized data in hyper local forecasts to customers that are highly dependent on the weather.

Yeah, for example, think of a utility company that needs to monitor ice, build up on power lines during a winter storm, or an airline that wants to rewrite a flight to avoid turbulence, or even a concert promoter that gets an alert to evacuate a stadium during a storm.

Kid says there's been a couple of sources of friction between the government and these private weather companies in the last few decades. Once once a friction has to do with the overall ethos of the national weather service, heat says if the agency could provide Better data to the public for IT would do just that right .

now you can on your phone you can pull up and and look at a radar image in real time in the one hundred and eighty or thousand nine hundred and ninety. Uh we didn't have the cell phone's to do that um but as you know, websites became available the national, the weather service said, well know we can actually make this data available .

to everybody but key says this stance didn't sit well with some private companies, you know the ones making a living from selling specialized forecasts if customers could get sophisticated data from the government for free, maybe they wouldn't want to pay for that kind of information anymore.

So that is one source of tension in the industry. Another one keeps, says, has to do with the flow of weather data. Remember when we said the government is a foundational data source? That's because historical noa and NASA paid for the big weather satellite that collect that information.

Well, these days, Keith says private companies are launching their own satellites and selling the data, and no and the national weather service have become customers in some cases. Key says the agencies are buying data from these private companies because it's cheaper than Operating those satellites themselves.

But then you've got a little bit of attention because the government typically provides all of the data IT has for free. And if they're buying data from a commercial satellite, they can't just turn around and give IT off free or else that commercial company only has one customer, which is no the .

government's new role as both the supplier and a customer of weather data has blurred the lines between public agencies and private sector businesses. But there are all examples of the two sides working together. Mary black on has been an official at noa and an executive in IBM weather business. SHE says the aviation industry could be .

a model if we know there is a weather event happening at an airport. What you'd really like to be doing is advising the airline what flights to cancel, which ones to delay. When I was at IBM, we would have forecasters that would be on calls with federal forecasters a couple times a day before an official forecast came came out. So that works fairly well over the years.

some policymakers have tried to limit the government's role in weather forecasting. This surfaced most recently in project twenty twenty five, a policy blue print from conservative think tank the heritage foundation. That document argues that some of lowest functions could be Carried out commercially at lower cost in higher quality.

But moving to a more privatized or market based model for weather forecasts, IT raises questions about whether potentially life saving information would only be available to people with resources .

yeah like some municipalities supplement government forecasts with information from private companies that they pay for and then it's like, what about towns that can afford to do that?

This is kind of a wild thing to think about when IT comes to potentially life saving information, right? Like one town has different information than another.

exactly. And in economics, we talk about this thing called a public good. Public good is something that can be used simultaneous ously by multiple people without diminishing, and at something that's available to everyone.

Rono mOlina is a professor of environmental and resource economics at the university of miami. He says an accurate weather forecasts definitely meets the criteria for a public good because.

I mean, if we follow the definition, everyone benefits, right? You consuming in a good, unlike forecasts for a hurricane for, for example, right? Does not. The minute you are like my ability to consume the same good forecasts and we all benefit.

we are Better off. And this benefit isn't just abstract for onoto. He and accord crunched the numbers around this federal program that aimed at improving hurricane forecasts. They estimate that IT LED to seven billion dollars and avoided damages and cost since two thousand and nine.

That's because when weather forecasts are more accurate, local governments can request federal money for protective measures in advance of a hurricane, can also issue timely .

evacuation Mandates the hurricane forecasts has generated in men's value for society. If you get an evacuation monday, then you're gona take this seriously, meaning you're gonna a protect your house, right? You gona pull pull down the shades. Or unlike about your house, if you might be exposed, you some floating that that might you like reduce your overall damages that you are exposed, you if that happens .

in the case of hurricane ton this year, accurate forecast ant that many people in florida had ample warning to prepare the alert, enable one of the largest evacuations in state history, and that might have prevented the devastation from being even worse. This episodes produced by Julia riche with engineering by quality lead, I was fact up by sale. Hot is an edited by Patty curst. Making cannon is our shoes editor, and the indicator is a production of npr.

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