"Europe heading down a bad road"

[Scott A. Kampas]

Tim V (I assume) recently made a good post on the front page of ST online on active constriction of weather data in Europe, the problems incurred and the discrepency in Europe between other public areas and versus the very open sharing of weather data in the U.S. It's a good read that probably gets missed by quite a few going directly to the fourm, and discussion can be made directly on the page: http://www.stormtrack.org/?p=18 .

 

[Tim Vasquez]

Thanks. I had a good talk with Stuart Robinson about that here at the conference, and he's somewhat pessimistic that things will change over there... the way of doing weather over there is so institutionalized. On the bright side, Canada has been opening their public radar a bit, conceivably because Toronto and Montreal residents may have been going to the NWS WSR-88Ds to get any useful information. There's a chance that open data might be contagious.

Tim

 

[Paul Knightley]

Stu's right, Tim - the UKMO is in the rather odd position of being funded by us tax-payers, and being able to compete in the commercial world of weather forecasting. For us forecasters at private UK weather companies, this makes it rather tricky to say the least!