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NOAA data threatened

The National Weather Service provides XML data feeds for all types of weather information. Here is the RSS feed for the District of Columbia. Here is the local forecast for Washington DC.

There are thousands of RSS aggregators (XML Feed readers) to read this XML data. Best of all, it's all free.

Think about this: the commericial company, Accuweather has successfully lobbied Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA) into introducing a bill to stop the National Weather Service from "competing" with private sector firms such as Accuweather and The Weather Channel, both of whom offer their forecasts online for free on ad-sponsored websites.

"If someone claims that our core mission is just warning the public of hazardous conditions, that's really impossible unless we forecast the weather all the time." "You don't just plug in your clock when you want to know what time it is." said Ed Johnson, the weather service's director of strategic planning and policy.

The Accuweather site, when I looked at it, had a UnitedHealthCare sponsored weather trivia section, and three separate straight up ads for Walgreens, LowerMyBills.com, and one of those "make a basket, win a free ipod" ads for The Incentive Reward Center.

The article goes on to say that there is the possibility of a new niche market where the amount of free data can be repackaged by small companies. Here are the freshmeat.net projects that use NOAA data, and here are the SourceForge projects. I used to use this epplet back when I used E on my desktop.

I also have a pair of Motorola T5950 NiCD two way radios that pick up NOAA channels. I wonder if those are going to go dark as well.

Posted by yakuza at April 21, 2005 09:00 PM | TrackBack