The longtime commercial-side meteorologist Mike Smith posted this to me via X/Twitter and offers a very different interpretation of Unidata:
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From the perspective of this private sector meteorologist, UNIDATA should never have been created and it has outlived its intended purpose.
At the time of UNIDATA's creation, the NWS discriminated as to who could get what data. For example, they produced national "experimental" thunderstorm probabilities which they provided to UNIDATA and its subscribers but would not provide to broadcasters or other private sector meteorologists.
At the time, the NWS set up a scheme where everyone in the private sector, including broadcasters, had to pay to receive the new NEXRAD data streams, but made them available free to UNIDATA. Predictably, a number of universities (Penn State, OU, etc.) set up arms that served paying customers. Remember, universities don't pay income, property taxes, salaries to the student mets who appeared on "Weather World" (Pennsylvania PBS) etc., but we had to pay for data that our taxes paid for to begin with and we also had to pay the "user fees."
A few years later, Congress passed the [misnamed] "Paperwork Reduction Act" which forced the NWS to provide 100% of its data to everyone, so that issue went away.
Most universities are much larger financially than most private sector weather companies and there is no reason universities cannot purchase the meteorological data they require. After all, universities pay for chemicals for the chemistry department, stethoscopes for medicine, etc., there's no reason meteorological data should be free.
People do not value what they don't pay for and "free" has been a bane on the growth and respect for all of weather science, including the NWS.
This freeze was just reversed. A welcome reversal of Trump and Musk’s wrecking ball impact on NSF-funded weather data sharing. https://www.unidata.ucar.edu/blogs/news/entry/nsf-unidata-return-to-operations?trk=feed_main-feed-card_feed-article-content
The longtime commercial-side meteorologist Mike Smith posted this to me via X/Twitter and offers a very different interpretation of Unidata:
~~
From the perspective of this private sector meteorologist, UNIDATA should never have been created and it has outlived its intended purpose.
At the time of UNIDATA's creation, the NWS discriminated as to who could get what data. For example, they produced national "experimental" thunderstorm probabilities which they provided to UNIDATA and its subscribers but would not provide to broadcasters or other private sector meteorologists.
At the time, the NWS set up a scheme where everyone in the private sector, including broadcasters, had to pay to receive the new NEXRAD data streams, but made them available free to UNIDATA. Predictably, a number of universities (Penn State, OU, etc.) set up arms that served paying customers. Remember, universities don't pay income, property taxes, salaries to the student mets who appeared on "Weather World" (Pennsylvania PBS) etc., but we had to pay for data that our taxes paid for to begin with and we also had to pay the "user fees."
A few years later, Congress passed the [misnamed] "Paperwork Reduction Act" which forced the NWS to provide 100% of its data to everyone, so that issue went away.
Most universities are much larger financially than most private sector weather companies and there is no reason universities cannot purchase the meteorological data they require. After all, universities pay for chemicals for the chemistry department, stethoscopes for medicine, etc., there's no reason meteorological data should be free.
People do not value what they don't pay for and "free" has been a bane on the growth and respect for all of weather science, including the NWS.