Errm, AccuWeather is one of the companies complaining about this proposal. From the article: "Jonathan Porter, a vice president and general manager at the private forecasting firm AccuWeather, warns that the agency’s proposed solution would harm the timeliness and accuracy of forecasts and severe weather warnings. He said the collection, processing and distribution of weather information are the agency’s “most important services.”"
Apparently not getting all that NWS weather data for free and then being abl to use it in their commercial weather forecasts would put a bit of a dent in their business model. Actually, I think commercial organisations like AccuWeather probably be the main ones affected; ordinary end users aren't going to be requesting large quantities of data.
So NOAA and the NWS are playing 3D Chess against AccuWeather whose been loddying against them for years? Now, unless AccuWeather wants to start paying for the data they'll need to start lobbying for them... I love it.
So basically, AccuWeather wants to have their cake and eat it too.
What's the nature of their lobbying?
Are they basically trying to defund any kind of front-end, consumer facing services from the NWS/NOAA, while keeping the back-end data sources available for them to feed their own consumer facing services?
That is the specific scenario. They've lobbied for the NWS to not run any public facing services, but still collect all of the data, run the models, and put the GRIB files up, but then stop there so that Accuweather can monetize it.
Apparently not getting all that NWS weather data for free and then being abl to use it in their commercial weather forecasts would put a bit of a dent in their business model. Actually, I think commercial organisations like AccuWeather probably be the main ones affected; ordinary end users aren't going to be requesting large quantities of data.