NOAA ISSUES NEW PARTNERSHIP POLICY: Response to Fair Weather

[mikegeukes]

NOAA ISSUES NEW PARTNERSHIP POLICY
Response to "Fair Weather" Recommendations Strengthens Relationships Among Government, Universities and the Private Sector

NOAA released the proposed policy for public comment in January this year. A total of 1,473 comments were received and all were considered in developing the NOAA policy issued today.
Of these, 1,190 supported the proposed policy and 176 opposed it.

http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2004/s2348.htm
http://www.weather.gov/im/FairweatherComments3.pdf

Mike

 

[Scott Olson]

This is good news. These adopted reccomendations could lead to the public release of products which were previously unavaliable to the public. Theorotically this might help make avaliable the SPC- Enhanced Thunderstorm Outlooks, NCAR Thunderstorm Auto-Nowcaster, various software programs and data sets previously unavaliable. Of course I am just coming to this conclusion by reading the reccomendations and extracting that these will further serve to push NOAA to make all of its information public and not just that which is made into a product.

 

[John Gnuechtel]

A lot of people think it's leading to a "privatized NWS"; essentially that people will have to pay for weather data not available on public broadcasts. Thing is, many of us here have already made that kind of leap by purchasing weather software. In this light, it really feels to me that they're just going to keep doing more of the same.

 

[rdale]

I didn't see anything that said they can't develop products internally before releasing to the public - just that they can't do anything to prevent release of data they have. It would be wrong to force everyone to jump right into a new segment of forecasting without giving them time to work out the kinks!

- Rob

 

[Tim Vasquez]

So what will this do to get us quasi real-time Level III NEXRAD?

Tim

 

[rdale]

Level III (NIDS) or Level II? L3 data has been available in realtime for years from the NWS FTP server, L2 is available from the 3 providers (OU, Purdue, NC.)

Once you get the L2 data (you have to pay the data fees) you can freely distribute it (data and/or pics) to your hearts content.

- Rob

 

[Tim Vasquez]

Ugh, I meant Level II, not Level III. Is Level II data still governed by old NIDS agreements, or is this truly "public" data?

 

[rdale]

Level II is truely free... You pay for the delivery fee from one of the providers to you - but once you've got it you can 1) display it 2) make pics and put them up for free 3) put the raw data on your website for free 4) sell pics 5) sell data and anything else you can think of. No restrictions at all!

- Rob