Short Wave - What's A Weather Forecast Worth?

Episode Date: December 14, 2024

The federal government has been tracking the weather for more than 150 years. Yet over the last few decades, the rise of the Internet and big tech have made weather forecasting a more crowded space. Today, our colleagues at NPR's daily economics podcast The Indicator report on the value of an accurate forecast and the debate over who should control weather data. Follow The Indicator on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, Shortwaiver is Regina Barbara here with an extra bonus episode for you this weekend. We wanted to give you a chance to hear something from our friends over at The Indicator, which is NPR's daily economics podcast. And this particular episode is about something science-y we think you'd be into. So, thanks for checking it out. And here are your Indicator hosts, Waylon Wong, and Adrienne Ma. Adrienne Ma, what is an app on your phone that you use every single day?

Like besides the text messaging app? Yeah, or like Candy Crush or whatever. I would have to say the weather app. It's like the first thing that I open in the morning. Me too. Now, here's another question. Do you ever think about where the weather forecast on your phone comes from? You know, until very, very recently, I had not thought about this at all.

I just assumed like somebody was beaming it to me from a satellite somewhere. Yeah, I never really thought about this either until I started using a specific weather app on my phone. The app lets me toggle between almost a dozen forecasting sources. And confession, sometimes if I'm hoping for a particular forecast, I'll just shop around in the app until I get the forecast that I want. You're like, oh, it's going to rain today. Or is it? Or is it? I guess this just goes to show how much access we have to weather information these days. Weather forecasting has gotten a lot more accurate in the last few decades.

It's a multi-billion dollar industry. Companies from tech startups to huge corporations are competing to produce more sophisticated and precise forecasts. This kind of scientific arms race is bringing to the four long-simmering tensions in the meteorology community. The tension is over how weather data should flow between the guns, government and private companies and at what price. This is the indicator from Planet Money. I'm Waylon Wong. And I'm Adrienne Ma. Today on the show, how much is an accurate weather forecast worth? Who should pay for it and who should benefit?

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. Commonly referred to as NOAA, and the National Weather Service is the main source of weather data, forecast, 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. So like when you see the local weather forecast on the news, for example, there's a good chance that the underlying data comes from the government.

And then there are lots of businesses that are taking that data, slicing and dicing it, and selling it onward. Keith Sider is a professor of climate science at the College of the Holy Cross, and he's also a senior policy advisor at the American Meteorological Society. 20 years ago, there were the few government agencies that worked in weather, and there were a fairly well-known list of private sector companies. Any of us could sit down with a piece of paper and write down to 20 main companies. And now that the private sector is vast, and it goes every. from very, very tiny one or two-person companies, up to companies like Microsoft and Google. Private companies like these take data from NOAA and the National Weather Service. They put their own spin on it, say, by applying proprietary computer models.

They can then sell specialized data and hyper-local forecast to customers that are highly dependent on the weather. Yeah, for example, think of a utility company that needs to monitor ice buildup on power lines during a winter storm, or an airline that wants to reroute a flight to avoid turbulence, or even a concert promoter that gets an alert to evacuate a stadium during a storm. 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. Keith says if the agency could provide better data to the public for free,

it would do just that. 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 cell phones 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. But Keith says this stance didn't sit well with some private companies, you know, the ones making a living from selling specialized forecasts. If customers could get sophisticated data from the government for free, maybe they wouldn't want to pay for that kind of information anymore.

So that is one source of tension in the industry. Another one, Keith says, has to do with the flow of weather data. Remember when we said the government is a foundational data source? That's because historically, NOAA and NASA paid for the big weather satellites that collect that information. 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.

But then you've got a little bit of attention because the government typically provides all of the data it has for free. And if they're buying data from a commercial satellite, they can't just turn around and give it all for free or else that commercial company only has one customer, which is NOAA. 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 business. But there are examples of the two sides working together. Mary Glacken has been an official at NOAA and an executive in IBM's weather business. She says the aviation industry could be a model. If we know there's a weather event happening at an airport, what you'd really like to be doing is advising the airline, what flights to cancel, which ones to delay. When I was at IBM,

And we would have forecasters that would be on calls with federal forecasters a couple times a day before an official forecast came out. So that works fairly well. 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 Noah's functions could be carried out commercial. commercially at lower cost and higher quality. But moving to a more privatized or market-based model for weather forecasts, it raises questions about whether potentially life-saving information would only be available to people with resources.

Yeah, like some municipalities supplement government forecasts with information from private companies that they pay for. But then it's like what about towns that can't afford to do that? This is kind of a wild thing to think about when it comes to potentially life-saving information, right? like one town has different information than another. Exactly. And in economics, we talk about this thing called a public good. A public good is something that can be used simultaneously by multiple people without diminishing. And it's something that's available to everyone.

Renato Molina is a professor of environmental and resource economics at the University of Miami. He says an accurate weather forecast definitely meets the criteria for a public good. Because, I mean, if we follow the definition, everyone benefits, right? you consuming a good, you know, like, forecast for a hurricane, for example, right, does not diminish, you know, like my ability to consume the same good forecast and we all benefit. We're all better off. And this benefit isn't just abstract for Renato. He and a colleague crunched the numbers around this federal program that's aimed at improving hurricane forecasts. They estimate that it led to $7 billion in avoided damages and costs since 2009.

That's because when weather forecasts are more accurate, Local governments can request federal money for protective measures in advance of a hurricane. They can also issue timely evacuation mandates. The hurricane forecast has generated immense value for society. If you get an evacuation mandate, then you're going to take this seriously, meaning you're going to protect your house, right? You're going to pull down the shatters or, you know, like, bore your house. If you might be exposed to some flooding, that might, you know, like, reduce the overall damages that you're exposed to if that happens. In the case of Hurricane Milton this year, accurate forecasts meant that many people in Florida had ample warning to prepare.

The alert enabled one of the largest evacuations in state history. And that might have prevented the devastation from being even worse. This episode was produced by Julia Ritchie with engineering by Quasi Lee. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez and edited by Patty Hirsch. Kaking Canyon is our show's editor and The Indicator is a production of NPR.