MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
An arms race of sorts is shaping up about privatizing weather forecasting. The tension is over how weather data should flow between the government and private companies and at what price. Here are Adrian Ma and Wailin Wong with our Planet Money podcast, The Indicator.
ADRIAN MA, BYLINE: The federal government has officially been in the weather business since 1870. That's when Congress created a national weather bureau to collect data and make forecasts. Today, that office is known as the National Weather Service. It's part of an agency called the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
WAILIN WONG, BYLINE: Commonly referred to as NOAA. And the National Weather Service is the main source of weather data, forecasts and warnings in the U.S. Its job is to protect life and property, and that means making weather data universally available to everyone as a public service.
MA: Weather forecasting has gotten a lot more accurate in the past few decades, and it's also become a multibillion-dollar industry. Companies from tech start-ups to huge corporations - they're competing to produce more sophisticated and precise forecasts by taking that weather data, slicing it, dicing it and selling it onward. Keith Seitter is a professor of climate science at the College of the Holy Cross.
KEITH SEITTER: Twenty years ago, there were a few government agencies that worked in weather, and there were a fairly well-known list of private sector companies. And now that the private sector is vast, and it goes everything from very, very tiny, one- or two-person companies up to companies like Microsoft and Google.
WONG: Keith says there's been a couple of sources of friction between the government and these private weather companies in the last few decades. One source of friction has to do with the overall ethos of the National Weather Service.
SEITTER: Right now, you can - on your phone, you can pull up and look at a radar image in real time. In the 1980s or 1990s, we didn't have the cellphones to do that. But as, you know, websites became available, the National Weather Service said, well, you know, we can actually make this data available to everybody.
WONG: But Keith says this stance didn't sit well with some private companies. If customers could get sophisticated data from the government for free, maybe they wouldn't want to pay for that kind of information anymore.
MA: So that is one source of tension in the industry. Another one, Keith says, has to do with the flow of weather data. Historically, NOAA and NASA paid for the big weather satellites that collect that information.
WONG: Well, these days, Keith says private companies are launching their own satellites and selling the data, and NOAA and the National Weather Service have become customers. In some cases, Keith says, the agencies are buying data from these private companies because it's cheaper than operating those satellites themselves.
MA: The government's new role as both a supplier and a customer of weather data has blurred the lines between public agencies and private-sector businesses.
WONG: Over the years, some policymakers have tried to limit the government's role in weather forecasting. This surfaced most recently in Project 2025, a policy blueprint from conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation. That document argues that some of NOAA's functions could be carried out commercially at lower cost and higher quality.
MA: But moving to a more privatized or market-based model for weather forecasts, it raises questions about whether potentially lifesaving information would only be available to people with resources.
WONG: For example, some municipalities supplement government forecasts with information from private companies that they pay for. But this begs the question, what about towns that can't afford to do that?
MA: Adrian Ma.
WONG: Wailin Wong. NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF OSCAR PETERSON'S "STORMY WEATHER") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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