Yesterday The Hill, a newspaper circulated on Capitol Hill, included an article about a proposed policy governing public and private roles and responsibilities for the provision of weather services.  An excerpt:

“Jeff Wimmer earns his living making pretty specific predictions about the weather.  For a few hundred dollars a month, businesses buy forecasts from Wimmer’s company — New York-based Fleet/Compu-Weather — to see not only if skies will be cloudy or clear but exactly when and where.  For a construction company, the information could determine if workers lay concrete, dig a hole or start tomorrow.  The information is “extremely site-specific and delivered in a customized time frame,” Wimmer said. “If you are a roofer, ‘partly cloudy, chance of showers’ doesn’t do you much good.”  But it is getting harder to predict the future of his own business, Wimmer said, thanks to a proposed policy shift at the National Weather Service (NWS), a division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).”

The problem with the debate over roles and responsibilities of the National Weather Service, which has been going on since the end of World War II, is that everyone talks about “solutions” without first describing the “problem” they seek to solve.  This has led to a muddled debate.  I have addressed this issue in a short essay and an article currently under review with the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society:

Pielke, Jr., R. A. 2003. The Great American Weather War, Natural Hazards Observer, July, pp. 1-3.

(in PDF) Pielke, Jr., R. A. (submitted). Weather and Climate Services: A Last Frontier in Technology Policy, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.

In the BAMS article I write:

“The problem then is that participants in the national enterprise for the provision of weather and climate services lack the means to judge appropriate roles and responsibilities from the standpoint of meeting national goals, and they suffer from a lack of mechanisms (e.g., institutions, leadership) to reach shared expectations on role and responsibilities. Part of the reason for the lack of means and mechanisms is that the weather and climate services enterprise is highly complex and sprawls across government, private and academic sectors. Further, national goals related to the provision of weather and climate services are many, and in the promulgation of goals into specific policies, many conflicts among policy objectives have been introduced. Conflict is exacerbated by national science and technology policies that force integration of the public and private sectors (e.g., the Bayh-Dole Act). Identification of conflicts – much less their resolution – is hampered by the lack of a “forest” scale perspective on weather and climate services. Instead, there are many with a view of individual “trees.” The lack of such a perspective means that debate and discussion over the decades has largely been engaged by those with a clear stake in particular outcomes. Consequently, the provision of weather and climate services has been treated much less like a policy issue to be assessed and addressed, than a political issue to be won.”

The issue is important and worth addressing.  If yesterday’s Hill article is accurate, then we should not suggest Congress to intervene, leaving this issue to the atmospheric sciences community.  By all indications this far, the best forecast is for a continuation of the status quo, which means a lack of a clear and useful technology policy in the atmospheric sciences, and consequently, a continued impedance of the transfer of meteorological science and technology to useful products and services.

Background

The National Research Council’s Fair Weather report can be found here.

The NWS proposed new policy, open for comment until June 30, 2004, can he found here.

Disclosures: The research Center that I direct has been the beneficiary of considerable research funding from NOAA and NWS, I also serve on the board of directors for Weatherdata, Inc., a weather risk management company, and I served as a consultant for the NRC Fair Weather report .