> NOAA/NWS, for example, is extremely underfunded so if they had to privilege to buy it they probably couldn't come to an agreement to buy it. As a result, they can't use that data to improve the accuracy of alerts/warnings/forcasts, the same exact tools that the big weather companies make all their money from. It's a shit cycle and totally unfair IMO.
Huh? This is kind of an odd take for a few reasons. For starters, NOAA isn't "extremely underfunded"; with the possible exception of the current budgeting cycle, NOAA generally does pretty well and has strong bipartisan support. It could always use more money, but I wouldn't call it "underfunded.
The reason NOAA doesn't buy more data is because most of the available data has limited value. Personal weather stations have substantial quality issues and add almost no value in areas where we already have high-quality surface observations. We thin out and throw away a ton of surface observations already during the data assimilation process to initialize our forecast models anyways - data from aloft is far more valuable and impactful from a forecast impact perspective.
For what it's worth, few if any companies use proprietary observations to improve their forecasts. It's an open secret that the vast majority of companies out there are just applying proprietary statistical modeling / bias correction on top of publicly available data. Only a handful of companies actually have novel observations, and there's limited evidence it makes a significant difference in the forecast. At best, it can result in the way that those statistical corrections are applied to existing forecasts and ensembles - you can count on one hand the number of companies that actually run a vertically-integrated stack including data assimilation of proprietary observations and end-to-end numerical modeling.
That isn't to say there isn't unique value in the observations. It's just that the industry flagrantly misleads about how they use them.
Huh? This is kind of an odd take for a few reasons. For starters, NOAA isn't "extremely underfunded"; with the possible exception of the current budgeting cycle, NOAA generally does pretty well and has strong bipartisan support. It could always use more money, but I wouldn't call it "underfunded.
The reason NOAA doesn't buy more data is because most of the available data has limited value. Personal weather stations have substantial quality issues and add almost no value in areas where we already have high-quality surface observations. We thin out and throw away a ton of surface observations already during the data assimilation process to initialize our forecast models anyways - data from aloft is far more valuable and impactful from a forecast impact perspective.
For what it's worth, few if any companies use proprietary observations to improve their forecasts. It's an open secret that the vast majority of companies out there are just applying proprietary statistical modeling / bias correction on top of publicly available data. Only a handful of companies actually have novel observations, and there's limited evidence it makes a significant difference in the forecast. At best, it can result in the way that those statistical corrections are applied to existing forecasts and ensembles - you can count on one hand the number of companies that actually run a vertically-integrated stack including data assimilation of proprietary observations and end-to-end numerical modeling.
That isn't to say there isn't unique value in the observations. It's just that the industry flagrantly misleads about how they use them.