A Cloud Over Weather Cooperation (1994)

Robert M. White
Technology Review Magazine
May/June 1994

For the past century and a half, the transmission of weather data between nations has been the last communications to stop on the eve of war and the first to resume when hostilities cease. Weather data flowed between Cuba and the United States throughout the 1962 missile crisis, for example, and continued between the Soviet Union and all other nations throughout the cold war. Storms know no national boundaries.

Because countries depend on each other's weather data, they adhere to a set of agreements promising free data exchange., with the World Meteorological Organization coordinating schedules and codes. Each country extracts from the worldwide pool the information needed to make the forecasts that protect life and property, ease the lives of citizens, and serve the needs of commerce.

Unfortunately, this marvel of scientific cooperation is now threatened. The once heretical notion of restricting the international exchange of weather data is being seriously debated among nations, and in some countries' meteorological services, it is already being unilaterally adopted and placed into practice.

The new restrictions are born of the perceived need of many countries' weather services to recover some of their enormous costs by selling specialized forecasts. Britain's government weather service, for example, sells forecasts to oil companies drilling in the North Sea. Such moves put government weather services into direct competition with private weather forecasting companies, many of them based in the United States, which also seeks a clientele among European businesses.

It is this competition that is starting to choke off the free flow of weather data, and these governments are seeking international agreements to sanctify a variety of further restrictions. According to international agreements now being discussed by the World Meteorological Organization, nations would continue to provide free access only related to large-scale weather patterns, such as the movement of storms. Butnew restrictions would be permitted for the more detailed weather readings needed to make highly localized and time-specific forecasts. Countries could forbid use of these "tier 2" data by third parties - including the commercial weather services that have risen as potential competitors.

Some European countries have begun, or have threatened, to prohibit the use of some of their critical weather data by private competitors. And starting this spring, data from some European weather satellites will be transmitted in encrypted form - making it available only to those who have an agreement and have been provided a decryption "key."

What is worrisome is the possibility that other countries, in Europe and elsewhere, will adopt similar restrictive practices. The U.S. Weather Service now provides data to private weather companies for the cost only of connecting to weather communication facilities, and to foreign countries at no cost - in both cases with no strings attached. (In the United States, private weather companies have become the principle dispensers of weather information.) But will this long-standing position remain tenable? As other countries cash in on their weather data, it will be tempting to place similar restrictions on information provided by U.S. weather satellites.

Such retaliatory moves would further undermine the stability and continuity of the present system of free data exchange. As countries begin to charge for or restrict the use of their weather information, governments will find themselves mired in endless negotiation on the terms of this exchange, haggling over not only the cost but the conditions of use. Countries unable to launch their own satellites would be hurt the most from restrictions on weather data. But even a satellite-launching country would suffer; while pictures from orbit help tract storms, good weather forecasts also depend on knowledge of localized temperature and air pressure readings that satellites cannot easily provide and that must be gathered by instrumentation on the ground and in the atmosphere.

The decision to keep weather data flowing freely will have to be made at the highest level og government. This issue should be in the hands of people charged with maintaining a broader vision of international relations, such as the U.S. Department of State and its equivalent in foreign countries.

The time for action is short. The World Meteorological Organization will take up this issue at its Congress in June 1995. The governments of this organization's 150 member countries need to affirm, by that time, that the open exchange of such information is a greater good than the near-term income that might be obtained by restricting access.

Robert M. White is President of the National Academy of Engineering. He was the first administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the parent agency of the U.S. National Weather Service.