Weather data should not be a competition
I’m glad the Commerce Commission has finally opened an investigation into the market for weather data. We have a ridiculous situation where two government agencies, MetService and Niwa, offer weather data and forecasting services, often in competition with each other.
They then make it difficult and expensive for anyone else to gain meaningful access to that data so they can offer their own services.
A report commissioned by the Ministry for Business, Innovation and Employment in 2017 found that weather data was a ‘‘natural’’ monopoly in New Zealand and ‘‘at the most commercial and restrictive end of cost and limitations on data use’’ when compared to other countries.
This is symptomatic of a deeper problem with science that leads to our Crown research institutes chasing commercial contracts to generate revenue when they might be serving the country better by enabling the private sector to innovate.
The United States gives away all of the weather data generated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to whoever wants to use it. As a result, the US has the largest and most innovative weather information industry in the world.
The Weather Company’s Weather Channel app is the world’s most downloaded weather app and the company is now owned by IBM, which paid more than US$2 billion (NZ$3.19b) for it.
IBM is applying its massive supercomputing power to analysing weather data to forecast storms, heat waves, and wind patterns for shipping and insurance companies, airlines and farmers. Amazon, Google and Oracle are in the same game. If NOAA was guarding its patch, a lot of that innovation wouldn’t be happening. Here, our agencies offer these types of services themselves to make money.
This is concerning because as the climate changes, weather patterns will too, and extreme weather incidents could cost billions in damage and dent our country’s GDP. We can’t rely on two government agencies to come up with all the smart uses of this data to apply to our own realworld problems.
Adopting the US model would be expensive but we need to weigh that against the innovation that freeing the data could generate.
We can’t rely on two government agencies to come up with all the smart uses of this data to apply to our own real-world problems.