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Comment by nemo44x | Hacker News Reader

Michael Lewis wrote about the NOAA and this exact type of thing in his last book. In essence the NOAA spends lots of tax payer money to collect weather data but can’t do much with it other than give it away exclusively to a handful of entities that can repackage and sell it.

The eventual dystopian end state could be where the NOAA can’t alert people to tornados and only those subscribing to a weather service would be alerted to get to safety.

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You can get an emergency radio capable of receiving VHF NOAA weather alerts. There is typically at least one of the frequencies within range where ever you are. You can subscribe to weather alerts through RSS on their site as well.

https://alerts.weather.gov/

You can even pass lat/long points to the forecast page and it will pull up the closest weather station, even points in the ocean work.

https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=43.4802&lon=-1...

That is nowhere near the breadth or detail of actual noaa data, more of a few legacy services. Its a travesty this is all we get.

> You can get an emergency radio capable of receiving VHF NOAA weather alerts.

Apparently this was grandfathered in a long time ago. NOAA is only allowed to send weather reports by radio and on specific frequencies. Doing the same with the internet, why that would be communism!

And for the record, NOAA Weather Radio is pretty cool -- I like to get my weather from it when I'm at home.

I'm right in Boston, and I can pickup transmissions from the Blue Hill Observatory with my cheap Baofeng.

I imagine they'll lose that eventually, so that the radio band can be privatized

Yes! The Michael Lewis book is called _The Fifth Risk_, and it's an amazing read. It's a series of contrasting stories: earnest government workers who have dedicated their careers to protecting all of us from threats like nuclear proliferation, on the one hand, and on the other politicians and narrowly interested lobbyists who view government as either a threat to their self-interest or an opportunity to tilt the economic playing field.

https://www.amazon.com/Fifth-Risk-Michael-Lewis/dp/132400264...

From the NPR review of the book:

> Take Trump's choice to head National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Commerce Department agency that, among other responsibilities, oversees the National Weather Service. For that critical position, Trump has chosen Barry Myers, who is CEO of the private forecasting service AccuWeather. As Lewis points out, AccuWeather repackages the weather service's own data and sells it to private concerns for a profit. Myers at one time argued that "the government should get out of the forecasting business." In other words, you want to know if it's going to rain tomorrow? Or which way that hurricane is tracking? Well, buy our app, or subscribe to our forecasts. Myers has yet to be confirmed.

https://www.npr.org/2018/10/02/652563904/the-fifth-risk-pain...

Have you seen weather.gov? They do provide free products.

For now. The NOAA is headed now by a man who spent 30 years trying to hobble the NWS.

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