Support the NWS: Weather Data Should Be Free!

It’s time to support the NWS! For the first time in its century-plus history, your National Weather Service is set to be dramatically crippled by individuals that don’t understand its mission and want to turn weather into another way to make money off the American consumer. And Project 2025, DOGE, and Elon Musk appear ready to take an axe to this life-saving service for every American.

As Elon Musk and his unelected and unvetted team of “programmers” set their sights on NOAA, we can no longer remain silent. The National Weather Service is a free, taxpayer-funded service that generates value far beyond its underfunded mandate and costs the average taxpayer just $3 per year. The National Weather Service’s free forecasts are believed to generate as much as $75 in economic output for each dollar spent. We support the NWS and its life-saving mission that no commercial weather company can match or provide that return on investment for the country, not just executives at private weather companies.

But it wasn’t always this way. In the early days of the internet, the National Weather Service was forbidden from sharing this data directly with the public. Only approved entities, like AccuWeather, had direct access, which they could charge the consumer for. Radar data cost as much as $20-40 monthly in 1990s dollars. The weather community and academia fought hard to free this data that American taxpayers have already paid for, and we won.

A new push has again begun to further strip the National Weather Service of its duties and defund an already underfunded service. This appears to us as an effort to sabotage the NWS work by the same forces trying to keep weather data behind a paywall two decades ago. The efforts are well-detailed in Project 2025, whose author is the director of the Office of Management and Budget.

Project 2025 calls for:

• The National Weather Service to commercialize all operations and end public forecasting services
• Ending NOAA’s satellite program, allowing commercial operations to take over
• The sale of public property (radars, etc.)
• Public forecasts to be offered by private companies for a fee

And this is not all. We think this is a recipe for disaster. Weather apps are inaccurate. Warnings come from one place for a reason. And we’ve lived this already. The National Weather Service and its essential services are being threatened by the same forces, causing pain for consumers in almost every aspect of our lives. Weather is not a profit center.

If anything, the National Weather Service is a net benefit to the nation’s economy. Trying to interpret government services like a balance sheet isn’t the way to do it.

We don’t think that commercial weather services could offer anywhere near the expertise of local NWS meteorologists. Many of these meteorologists have spent years learning the quirks of their local climates, something that even modern computer modeling can’t match. Project 2025 and other private weather forecasting industry detractors don’t tell you that your local weatherman has no place in these plans.

Will a person sitting at a computer 3,000 miles away understand what’s happening where you live? Of course not.

We should support the NWS, whether left or right. Call your congressperson today and let them know that we’re already getting squeezed enough by companies profiting from us. We already paid for this; Elon and others have no right to take it away. If they want to build something better, they can spend their own money, not the taxpayer’s.

Support the NWS and keep it free for all. We pay enough.