The existing paid weather and mapping services are not excited. Right now they just repackage days that’s provided by the government for free, so while their customer base isn’t as big as it would be without NOAA, NWS, and USGS data available to anyone, their expenses are super low.
They’d need 1000x at many customers to cover the expense of gathering their own data.
Instead, what they’ll all end up doing is paying huge money to third party services (e.g.SpaceX), who have existing infrastructure that can be used to launch weather monitoring services and will end up being the only ones to benefit from this.
Their argument is that the government releasing detailed weather data for free makes it impossible for commercial offerings to compete. So it’s likely they’ll either lobby to force the government services to stop providing anything other than the raw data (leaving weather companies to translate it into forecasts and useful visualizations), or to privatize the NOAA weather stations and satellites so they can sell the data for profit.
The existing paid weather and mapping services are not excited. Right now they just repackage days that’s provided by the government for free, so while their customer base isn’t as big as it would be without NOAA, NWS, and USGS data available to anyone, their expenses are super low.
They’d need 1000x at many customers to cover the expense of gathering their own data.
Instead, what they’ll all end up doing is paying huge money to third party services (e.g.SpaceX), who have existing infrastructure that can be used to launch weather monitoring services and will end up being the only ones to benefit from this.
Their argument is that the government releasing detailed weather data for free makes it impossible for commercial offerings to compete. So it’s likely they’ll either lobby to force the government services to stop providing anything other than the raw data (leaving weather companies to translate it into forecasts and useful visualizations), or to privatize the NOAA weather stations and satellites so they can sell the data for profit.