I've used weather.gov for years and love the service. Every person I've talked to who complains about the crap coverage by the weather companies in the US that I've shown it to uses it exclusively as well. It's a perfect example of the governments lack of profit motive producing a genuinely better product than the competition. I know this isn't always the case but it certainly is here.

I don't agree with lots of things our government spends money on but stuff like this I absolutely support.

> It's a perfect example of the governments lack of profit motive producing a genuinely better product than the competition

There is no better product because it's not commercially viable to compete against the free money that NOAA receives. If NOAA didn't exist, others would try to compete commercially in that space.

In the UK the Met Office is notionally a part of the Ministry of Defence[0] but is required to be profit generating, so basically operates as a commercial enterprise. Whilst they provide free weather forecasting and alerts for the public, commercial users have to pay for data ( raw and processed ).

After 93 years the BBC decided to change from the Met Office to another source, the free market at work. The Met Office has to improve its product and / or reduce its costs to keep competing; NOAA has no such incentives towards efficiency or improvement.

[0] Correction: transferred to the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills in 2011

> the free money

It's not free. It's what patriots pay their taxes for.

and how would competitors get funding? by making each member of the public individually pay for a subscription?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good

Is the logic here that by slashing NOAA funding, no real claims of climate change will be made and Trump will prevail?

That's probably a part of it, but the budget cuts across the government (outside of defense and law enforcement) are also a realization of goal of at least the Bannon faction of the Trump White House to basically burn the whole system of government to the ground.

Because its not (yet, at any rate) a dictatorship, and they need something that even Republicans in Congress will vote for, for one thing.

And probably also because by removing one hair at a time you can eventually make someone bald without he even noticing.

I'm afraid this might be the wrong place to look for logic.

However, at least it looks like they were able to finish modernizing their website before the budget got the ax:

https://forecast-v3.weather.gov/documentation?redirect=legac...

Same. A lot of weather sites just pull the free NWS data and wrap it in ads.

Some use higher-resolution grids or better models (check http://forecastadvisor.com/ for your area), but they're almost always at least based on the free NWS data. Also, only weather.gov lets you click around on a map to get their model results for any square on the grid, not just towns and cities.

What is wrong with these people?!

EDIT: Weird. "Its satellite data division would lose $513 million, or 22 percent, of its current funding under the proposal... National Weather Service would be fortunate by comparison, facing only 5 percent cuts." I doubt slashing the satellite budget would improve forecasts, which tend to rely upon data.

It's very easy to look at this and conclude that the White House has serious problems with studying climate change. I'm sure sticking our heads in the sand will fix the environment.

You are confusing your goals with their goals. Their goal is to stop environmentalism from interfering with near-term business performance, not "fix the environment".

I started using windytv.com after seeing it mentioned here. It uses the European ECMWF weather model, which is well known in the meteorological community to be more accurate than the NOAA GFS: http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2016/06/us-numerical-weather-p.... With this budget cut, it looks like that will continue.

In particular, as a non-hydrostatic model, the ECMWF gives much better forecasts in mountainous regions like the Eastern Sierra (where I live).

Heh, I believe we may share some common interests.

Thanks for reminding me of windytv. A friend showed it to me, but I was put off by the garish animated UI, then forgot the URL. The UI still sucks, but I appreciate the ECMWF data, so maybe I'll give it another go.

The really absurd part is that they still wanted that data provided to these private companies from the NWS, just not available to the public.

Almost all of these companies simply regurgitate NWS information pretending it's their own anyway.

Forecasts are fuzzy enough that they may play in that area; but serious things like severe weather warnings only come from the NWS.

A friend of mine was an intern at CNN. One of his jobs was to look at all the NWS weather alerts and forecasts. They would prepare it for the reporters to read and report about. He had to get to work at 4am every morning to complete it before the morning shows.

> senator wanted to stop them from posting weather online because it competed with "private sector" weather companies.

I wish more voters knew and understood this. Amazing public services have been constantly under attack long before trump so particular rich people can get richer.

That was Rick Santorum pandering to his pals at Accuweather.

My guess is that vendors with bigger pockets and a better track record of buying influence (IBM, Monsanto) wants to leverage its own weather property)

But doesn't even Accuweather, at least on some level, get their source data from government sources? If they generate their own forecasts using NWP models they still need initial conditions which usually come from from coarse-grid weather forecasts provided by the governments.

If the quality of these coarse-grid forecasts is degraded it's going to have an effect on all downstream processing/forecasts.

They wanted to consume the data for free, but prohibit you from doing so.

IBM makes millions of dollars selling supercomputers to NOAA.

The NWS regional twitter accounts are also a great source and many will even talk and answer questions. The Portland team is really on their game, especially that last ice/snow storm we had.

NOAA is also the only source for river flood predictions:

https://water.weather.gov/ahps2/hydrograph.php?wfo=rev&gage=...

https://water.weather.gov/ahps2/hydrograph.php?wfo=fgf&gage=...

Ah, yes, the Accuweather Protection Act. I remember.

I have boycotted Accuweather since then.

Since it's a `.gov`, its days are probably numbered as well.

Enjoy while it lasts.