Should Weather Data Really Be Withheld From the Public?

Monitors at the National Weather Service bureau in Flagstaff, Arizona. A conservative policy blueprint calls for shifting the service to commercial operations, possibly drying up free data services for the news industry. Photo: Bill Morrow via Flickr Creative Commons (CC by 2.0).

WatchDog Opinion: Should Weather Data Really Be Withheld From the Public?

By Joseph A. Davis

They’re doing it again. The longstanding conservative campaign to privatize taxpayer-funded weather data has shown up in the Trumpian Project 2025.

It has long been a dream of conservatives to make people pay for this information — which belongs to the public.

Another part of the conservative agenda is to bury evidence of human-caused climate heating. The fossil fuel industry (a major Trump backer) shares the dream.

Once Project 2025, organized by conservative think tank Heritage Foundation, became controversial, candidate Trump disavowed any knowledge of it. That was a lie.

Many of its scores of authors were officials in his first administration. There is plenty of evidence of his awareness and support. The 922-page document is literally a playbook for a putative second Trump presidency.

 

Dismantling NOAA, National Weather Service

Project 2025 recommends breaking up the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. NOAA “should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories,” it says.

Among NOAA’s agencies is the National Weather Service. Project 2025 says the administration should “focus the NWS on Commercial Operations.” The document does not state clearly just what exactly that means.

In context, it seems to mean that the NWS should gather and disseminate just raw data — and leave all the forecasting and prediction to private weather companies, who will then charge people for it.

 

Right now the NWS provides free,

timely, mostly accurate forecasts of

local conditions several days out.

Anyone can get them.

 

Right now the NWS provides free, timely, mostly accurate forecasts of local conditions several days out. Anyone can get them — via smartphone, online, via cable or broadcast.

Some local newspapers and TV stations employ their own meteorologists to add color, details and personality. Or simply to appear on camera. Others pay services like The Weather Channel or AccuWeather.

There is a $7 billion industry of private weather services that provide customized forecasts for specialized industries like agriculture, fisheries, travel/transportation, utilities and outdoor events. And they rely largely on measurements and data from the NWS’s (and NOAA’s) vast network of local weather stations, satellites and ocean instruments. They get this data free, thanks to the taxpayers. Some supplement it with their own measurements as well.

The NWS thoughtfully provides lists of private weather services (not one list, but three) to the public online. Free.

 

How it started

Long before Trump was even a glimmer in Fox’s eye, conservatives wanted to privatize weather.

It goes back at least to 2005, when conservative Senator Rick Santorum, R-Pa., introduced a bill to privatize the NWS. It went nowhere. But Santorum was trying to do a favor for a business in his state: AccuWeather.

AccuWeather had been founded in 1962 by Joel N. Myers, then a Penn State grad student in meteorology. His brother, Barry Lee Myers, became CEO in 2007. He had lobbied for Santorum’s bill.

In October 2017, then-President Trump nominated Barry Lee Myers to head NOAA. Trump nominated Myers despite his lack of any scientific background, which had traditionally been a criterion for the head of NOAA, a scientific agency.

As a nominee, Myers divested himself of any holdings in AccuWeather and resigned as CEO. Myers’ nomination got through committee but languished in the Senate. The nomination remained stalled for two years, after which Myers withdrew his name because of health. Accuweather was eventually sold to other owners.

Now, in Project 2025, the old idea of weather privatization has come back to life.

 

Free as the air we breathe? Or data at a price?

Certainly, Project 2025’s proposal to privatize weather data forbodes a dark future for freedom of information under any imaginable Trump administration. But that’s hardly all of it.

 

Weather data is the lifeblood

of many stories that concern

environmental journalists and

their audience — the U.S. public.

 

Today, weather data is the lifeblood of many stories that concern environmental journalists and their audience — the U.S. public. Heat waves, hurricanes, floods, droughts, blizzards, crop yields, grid reliability and energy prices are some of them. Without solid information, open information, it’s hard to report the truth.

But in the end, a lot of it boils down to climate change.

It would be easy enough to dismiss the NWS privatization proposal as the kleptocratic aspiration of a Putin fanboy. Putin built his now dictatorial power by giving away the Soviet industrial infrastructure to the oligarchs who enable him.

But Project 2025 doesn’t hide its most basic motive: to serve the interests of the fossil fuel industries by denying climate change and attacking the established scientific basis for concern.

It lays this out clearly in its justification for downsizing and dismantling NOAA. It says NOAA’s component agencies, “Together … form a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity.”

[Editor’s Note: An earlier Issue Backgrounder also looks at the conflicts posed by weather data privatization.]

Joseph A. Davis is a freelance writer/editor in Washington, D.C. who has been writing about the environment since 1976. He writes SEJournal Online's TipSheet, Reporter's Toolbox and Issue Backgrounder, and curates SEJ's weekday news headlines service EJToday and @EJTodayNews. Davis also directs SEJ's Freedom of Information Project and writes the WatchDog opinion column.

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* From the weekly news magazine SEJournal Online, Vol. 9, No. 33. Content from each new issue of SEJournal Online is available to the public via the SEJournal Online main page. Subscribe to the e-newsletter here. And see past issues of the SEJournal archived here.