The private meteorology community is worried about unfair competition from the academic and public sectors and the lack of a clear policy concerning how the sectors interact and how the sectors should solve disputes that arise. The private sector feels that the government’s weather services are stealing a piece of their pie and doing it unfairly, since the private sector contributes tax dollars which help to fund the government weather services that eventually compete against it. Further, the private sector feels that the nation as a whole could benefit from a more limited NWS/NOAA role. This more limited role would remove some services that are duplicated between the government and private sector which would release more government money and personnel to address the core functions of NWS/NOAA.

The recent NRC Fair Weather Report and the very recent Santorum Senate Bill S.786 both address this issue, and numerous other academic papers and press releases by industry organizations also address the issue. The latest release by the National Council of Industrial Meteorologists is perhaps the most detailed release to-date, and outlines four goals that the NWS/NOAA should work toward while developing policies to solve the on-going debate. In part, these goals mention “…prohibiting uniformly within NOAA the development and dissemination of products and services that unfairly compete with the products and services of private sector meteorology…” and “Encourage positively NOAA’s interaction and collaboration with private sector meteorology through a variety of means and venues…”

What’s lost in this latest release by the NCIM is the mention of a transparent, systematic process to assess new products and services and to settle disputes. This system should also assign accountability for who should carry out this process as well as outline any repercussions if a party does not hold up its end of a deal. Although I imagine that each sector would support some type of system like the one mentioned in this paragraph, each sector is pushing the other sectors to develop this system instead of taking the initiative to do it themselves or to at least start the process.

The end result of this ongoing debate should not be a senate bill or legislated solution that sets hard lines on what each sector should or should not do. Alternatively, the end result should be a process that is agreeable to all parties and developed by all parties. For all the debating and finger pointing that I’ve seen over the past few years, I still find it hard to believe that the sectors are not working to collaboratively to develop this system. Hopefully the new American Meteorological Society’s Weather and Climate Enterprise Committee will be a starting point for this development.

Following the recent Prometheus posts on Hurricanes (here and here), I want to bring up another issue that involves hurricane forecasting. In 1999, Roger Pielke Jr. wrote this article in Science which points out the differences between improving hurricane track forecasts and translating this improved forecast into measurable benefits for emergency managers and other decision makers and stakeholders. The gist of the 1999 article is that hurricane track forecasts since 1970 improved at the rate of about 1% per year while the length of coastline warned per storm increased from about 300 nautical miles (nm) in the late 60’s to about 400 nm during the 1990’s. Basically, the science of prediction improved, but the science and art of positioning government agencies and the public for hurricanes did not improve, at least by the metric of ‘miles of coastline warned’.

Fast-forward to 2005, and it seems like both the improved prediction and stagnant positioning trends are the same as they were in 1999. An article in the May 2005 issue of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS) points to the success of the U.S. Weather Research Program’s (USWRP) goal of “…tropical cyclone track forecast guidance products with an improvement in accuracy of 20%…” The author of this article points out that the 20% improvement goal was “challenging”, and as I write on page 26 of my undergraduate thesis, specific and challenging goals are proven to lead to more successful results than general, or “do our best” goals. In this vein, I applaud the research effort that lead to the successful completion of bettering hurricane track forecast models by 20%.

However…

I find it hard to believe that the recent BAMS article did not once mention how the improvement in track forecasting has impacted other societal metrics (miles of coastline warned, number of people evacuated, public/emergency manager confidence in forecasts etc). Although the author pointed out the short time needed in this project to transfer knowledge from research findings into the operational hurricane models, there is no mention of advancements in the societal positioning for hurricanes as a result of the improving trend in track prediction.

The field of meteorology has and will continue to suffer from a positioning problem. While the state of the science is improving and prediction errors are decreasing, large-scale research efforts generally still do not address transitioning improvements in the science to improvements for the public at large. Perhaps we can simply assume that more accurate hurricane track models will directly lead to improvements in the public warning system, but a September 2003 BAMS article shows that official hurricane track forecast errors are larger when watches and warnings are in effect than at times when there are no watches and warning (i.e. as the hurricane nears land and people, track forecast errors increase).

All of this points to the need for a more systematic focus on how meteorology influences and helps the public. The science of weather will undoubtedly show continuous improvement as it has for the past 50 years, but will the science be able to position itself to make the most of these improvements and help the nation (and the world) use more accurate meteorological information to save lives and money? I argue that meteorological science will help the nation most and will receive more positive attention if it focuses on positioning as well as predicting.