What's A Weather Forecast Worth?

The federal government has been tracking the weather for more than 150 years. Yet over the last few decades, the rise of the Internet and big tech have made weather forecasting a more crowded space. Today, our colleagues at NPR's daily economics podcast The Indicator https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510325/the-indicator-from-planet-money report on the value of an accurate forecast and the debate over who should control weather data. Follow The Indicator on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-indicator-from-planet-money/id1320118593 or Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/4X3yDKgVTWRjSd6r0vhgo4?si=4b9b822a46094943. Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ atplus.npr.org/shortwave http://plus.npr.org/shortwave. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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• 0:19Regina Barber?

  Hey, Short Wavers. Regina Barber here with an extra bonus episode for you this weekend. We wanted to give you a chance to hear something from our friends over at The Indicator, which is NPR's daily economics podcast. And this particular episode is about something sciency we think you'd be into. So thanks for checking it out. And here are your Indicator hosts, Wayland Wong and Adrian Ma.

• 0:43Speaker 02

  Adrian Ma, what is an app on your phone that you use every single day?

• 0:48Speaker 03

  Um, like besides the text messaging app?

• 0:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, or like Candy Crush or whatever.

• 0:55Speaker 03

  I would have to say the weather app. It's like the first thing that I open in the morning.

• 1:00Speaker 02

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

• 1:07Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, I never really thought about this either until I started using a specific weather app on my phone. The app lets me toggle between almost a dozen forecasting sources. And confession, sometimes if I'm hoping for a particular forecast, I'll just shop around in the app until I get the forecast that I want.

• 1:36Speaker 03

  You're like, oh, it's going to rain today. Or is it?

• 1:39Speaker 02

  Or is it?

• 1:42Speaker 03

  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 forecasts.

• 2:00Speaker 02

  This kind of scientific arms race is bringing to the fore long simmering tensions in the meteorology community. The tension 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 Wayland Wong.

• 2:16Speaker 03

  And I'm Adrian Ma. Today on the show, how much is an accurate weather forecast worth? Who should pay for it? And who should benefit?

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• 3:46Speaker 03

  The federal government has officially been in the weather business since 1870. 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. It's part of an agency called the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

• 4:02Speaker 02

  Commonly referred to as NOAA. And the National Weather Service is the main source of weather data, forecasts, and warnings in the US. 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's a good chance that the underlying data comes from the government.

• 4:25Speaker 03

  And then there are lots of businesses that are taking that data, slicing and dicing it, and selling it onward. Keith Seider is a professor of climate science at the College of the Holy Cross. And he's also a senior policy advisor at the American Meteorological Society.

• 4:40Speaker 05

  20 years ago, there were the few government agencies that worked in weather, 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 the 20 main companies. And now that the private sector is vast, and it goes everything from very, very tiny one or two-person companies up to companies like Microsoft and Google.

• 5:01Speaker 02

  Private companies like these take data from NOAA and the National Weather Service. They put their own spin on it, say by applying proprietary computer models. They can then sell specialized data and hyper-local forecasts to customers that are highly dependent on the weather.

• 5:17Speaker 03

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

• 5:32Speaker 02

  Keith says there's been a couple of sources of friction between the government and these private weather companies in the last few decades. One source of friction has to do with the overall ethos of the National Weather Service. Keith says if the agency could provide better data to the public for free, it would do just that.

• 5:50Speaker 05

  Right now, you can, on your phone, you can pull up and look at a radar image in real time. In the 1980s or 1990s, we didn't have the cell phones to do that. But as, you know, websites became available, the National Weather Service said, well, you know, we can actually make this data available to everybody.

• 6:09Speaker 02

  But Keith 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.

• 6:25Speaker 03

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

• 6:42Speaker 02

  Well, these days, Keith says, private companies are launching their own satellites and selling the data, and NOAA and the National Weather Service have become customers. In some cases, Keith says, the agencies are buying data from these private companies because it's cheaper than operating those satellites themselves.

• 6:59Speaker 05

  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 all for free, or else that commercial company only has one customer, which is NOAA.

• 7:15Speaker 03

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

• 7:35Speaker 06

  If we know there's 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 of times a day before an official forecast came out. So that works fairly well.

• 8:01Speaker 02

  Over the years, some policymakers have tried to limit the government's role in weather forecasting. This surfaced most recently in Project 2025, a policy blueprint from conservative think tank, The Heritage Foundation. That document argues that some of NOAA's functions could be carried out commercially at lower cost and higher quality.

• 8:21Speaker 03

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

• 8:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, like some municipalities supplement government forecasts with information from private companies that they pay for. But then it's like, what about towns that can't afford to do that?

• 8:41Speaker 03

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

• 8:50Speaker 02

  Exactly. And in economics, we talk about this thing called a public good. A public good is something that can be used simultaneously by multiple people without diminishing, and it's something that's available to everyone.

• 9:02Speaker 03

  Renato Molina is a professor of environmental and resource economics at the University of Miami. He says an accurate weather forecast definitely meets the criteria for a public good. Because, I mean, if we follow the definition, everyone benefits, right? You consuming a good, you know, like, forecast for a hurricane.

• 9:19Speaker 06

  For example, right, this not diminish, you know, like my ability to consume the same good forecast and we all benefit. We're all better off.

• 9:27Speaker 02

  And this benefit isn't just abstract for Renato. He and a colleague crunched the numbers around this federal program that's aimed at improving hurricane forecasts. They estimate that it led to $7 billion in avoided damages and costs since 2009.

• 9:43Speaker 03

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

• 9:54Speaker 06

  The hurricane forecast has generated immense value for society. If you get an evacuation mandate, then you're going to take this seriously, meaning you're going to protect your house, right? You're going to pull down the shatters or, you know, like, board your house. If you might be exposed to some flooding, that might, you know, like, reduce the overall damages that you're exposed to if that happens.

• 10:14Speaker 02

  In the case of Hurricane Milton this year, accurate forecasts meant that many people in Florida had ample warning to prepare. The alert enabled one of the largest evacuations in state history, and that might have prevented the devastation from being even worse.

• 10:34Speaker 02

  This episode was produced by Julia Ritchie with engineering by Kwesi Lee. It was fact checked by Sarah Juarez and edited by Patty Hirsch. Kiki Cannon is our show's editor, and The Indicator is a production of NPR.

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