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How We All Pay for the Weather Channel

The Weather Channel — or Weather Underground or your TV weather person or your DIY forecasting buddy — pretty much just have what we have, which is the internet and the ability to access government-supplied data.

Most of us know well enough by now that it’s just going to get worse. Worse meaning stuff like Sandy, yes, but also the way undersung epic drought in the West, the worst since the ‘50s, currently baking the United States’ agricultural core and poised to put massive pressure on most animal-related food prices (and, thus, the weak economy). Extreme weather is the new normal — hurray — and that means interesting things for weather forecasting — mostly that’s its importance in keeping many people from dying is all the more so. In other words, it’s not a particularly great time for a meteorology gap (in which our ability to forecast sinks), though that’s exactly what’s coming. The NOAA’s current polar satellites are dying, and their replacement, the JPSS-1 satellite, is behind schedule, leaving a space in between.

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The gap, predicted to occur between 2016 and 2018, is the result of mismanagement and, unsurprisingly, funding squeezes. The JPSS-1 is currently funding itself only because it’s been able to squirrel away money from other NOAA projects. But that’s fine, right? We can just get our forecasts from the Weather Channel in 2017. Their weather satellites are probably better anyway. Except they don’t have satellites. The Weather Channel — or Weather Underground or your TV weather person or your DIY forecasting buddy — pretty much just have what we have, which is the internet and the ability to access government-supplied data. For free. Yep, all the way up to and including a direct download from the actual satellites, it’s free.

The business of weather forecasting is one of the top marvels of taxpayers funding private business that exists. Every weather operation out there advertises its own very exclusive, very superior operation. You’d just about have to assume that every meteorology brand is totally proprietary, has its own equipment orbiting in space and its own forecast models, composed by long rooms full of feverishly working statisticians. Except that none of them do. Instead. you get the same information fed from different brands. Sometimes the end-result forecasts are distinct, but it’s still all slightly different interpretations of the same stuff, with no ability to go beyond that.

If pressed, the answer you’d get from the industry is that what it provides is analysis, and that’s crucial. But, what you’d be less likely to hear is that that analysis is less of raw, uninterpreted data than it is of model-based predictions provided by the NOAA (and its overseas analogs). So: which model is better, or what predictions do the models repeat.

And there’s no reason to go beyond what the NOAA provides — or provide non-tax support to the NOAA — even if a private entity had the means to duplicate the NOAA’s massive infrastructure. Because all of the competition is limited to the same thing. The Weather Channel probably wouldn’t care all that much if forecast data came from psychics, so long as every one else is getting their information from psychics. They haven’t lost the ability to sell anything; a slick dressing can be applied to anything. That could be an approximately $5 billion a year government agency, or some dude with incense.

I tried reasonably hard to find any evidence of the Weather Channel lobbying for NOAA funding or making statements about NOAA funding or advocating for its lifeblood, but nothing much turned up. Maybe the, ahem, Bain Capital-owned (in part) property keeps its advocating for improved climate science in America closeted, but I suspect not. Private weather organizations have stumbled onto a business plan that’s both entirely dependent on science — as close as most Americans actually get to science in their day-to-day lives — and has the luxury to not really give a damn about that science.

Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.