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Comment by cryptoz | Hacker News Reader

Is NOAA allowed to develop US weather apps? I vaguely recall that Accuweather or others lobbied to prevent official US NWS weather apps from existing.

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There was guidance [1] back in 2011 that prohibited development of mobile applications. As far as I know the situation hasn't changed since then.

[1] http://www.nwseo.org/Four%20Winds/11_12_28_Sobien_Lubchenco_...

It was way worse than that. Back in 2005, Rick Santorum, the republican senator from AccuWeather's home state, introduced a bill that sought to privatize the National Weather Service's weather data and forecast products. AccuWeather's Founder and CEO, brothers Joel and Barry Myers, were among Santorum's biggest campaign donors, and they argued that the NWS forecast products were unfairly preventing them from making money on their similar products. Accuweather used the NWS data themselves, so they sought to prevent the NWS from publishing the data publicly, while preserving their own access to it.

Not coincidentally, Donald Trump has nominated Barry Meyers to lead the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

A good summary is at https://www.outsidethebeltway.com/rick-santorums-war-against...

The bill was called the National Weather Service Duties Act of 2005.

Such a sad state of affairs.

At that time there was also an effort to privatize aviation data, the Aeronav products that the FAA produces. It was a huge clusterfuck but in the end calmed down.

In both cases the result would be significantly worse applications for consumers. There's a lot of fantastic weather apps built on free NWS and NOAA data, things like Dark Sky, that would be impossible if the data were not freely available. Same for aviation with apps like Foreflight.

They are basically forbidden. Trump wants to put the owner of AccuWeather in charge of NOAA.

Not sarcasm: https://eu.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/04/24/donald-trum...

https://www.weather.gov/ does have a mobile site that is functional, but it could be better.

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