New Bill Threatens Free Online Weather Information

Posted on April 22, 2005

Republican Senator Rick Santorum has introduced a new bill that will benefit commercial weather services like AccuWeather and do away with free forecasts provided by the National Weather Service paid for with your tax dollars. If the bill goes through you could end up paying a company like AccuWeather for your daily weather forecasts. In an article about the bill, the Palm Beach Post reports:

Do you want a seven-day weather forecast for your ZIP code? Or hour-by-hour predictions of the temperature, wind speed, humidity and chance of rain? Or weather data beamed to your cellphone? But under a bill pending in the U.S. Senate, it might all disappear. The bill, introduced last week by Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., would prohibit federal meteorologists from competing with companies such as AccuWeather and The Weather Channel, which offer their own forecasts through paid services and free ad-supported Web sites.

Senator Santorum says the emergency information provided by the NWS would remain, but the Palm Beach Post reports that critics say the bill's language is vague and that even hurricane warnings from the government could be undermined by the bill. A spokesperson for Senator Bill Nelson, D-Fla. said:

"The weather service proved so instrumental and popular and helpful in the wake of the hurricanes. How can you make an argument that we should pull it off the Net now?" said Nelson's spokesman, Dan McLaughlin. "What are you going to do, charge hurricane victims to go online, or give them a pop-up ad?"

Critics also argue that the bill would stifle innovation. The NWS provides RSS feeds and other content delivery services that new weather services, blogs and websites can use to provide weather data in new and interesting ways to the public. If the bill is passed and the free weather data is pulled from the Web then these services will be forced to shut down.

WEATHER