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The American Prospect: Republicans Break the Weather
The American Prospect - Republicans Break the Weather
The private sector can’t match the value proposition of the National Weather Service, but companies work to entice Americans to pay up anyway. What happens if they can’t?
by Gabrielle Gurley May 20, 2025
When it comes to summer weather in the eastern half of the country, people either whine about the haze and heat, the humidity and the thunderstorms, or they debate the best free app to track what’s coming next.
Name brands like The Weather Channel and AccuWeather have free smartphone apps for the basics: high and low temperatures, sun or clouds or rain. More advanced hyperlocal alerts and frequent forecast updates or models will cost you. Clime, a newer offering, bills itself as an “all-in-one weather assistant” and offers freebies like current radar maps and seven-day forecasts. But severe weather “Clime PRO” add-ons like lightning or hurricane trackers will set you back $9.99 a week (which they call their “most popular” option) or $99.99 for the year.
For most people, it’s the zero-dollar options that get the highest praise. The National Weather Service (NWS) serves up weather and climate data free of charge for consumers, and for the businesses that create these weather apps. Don’t look for an NWS phone app: The agency doesn’t have one, though it does have a shortcut that takes a user to weather.gov, its portal for forecasts, watches and warnings, and other resources. But the broader effort to design a new mobile-friendly site has been thrown off-kilter: A beta version of that site notes that it has been “deactivated until further notice due to the loss of critical federal staff, which leaves this project without the resources required to continue its development or for routine monitoring and maintenance.”
Despite a treasure trove of public-facing weather intelligence, Americans may be headed toward the day when they have to pay for anything beyond the basics, and where your ability to know about imminent danger depends on how much money you have to spend on it.
The Trump administration’s scorched-earth march across the federal bureaucracy threw hundreds of NWS forecasters, researchers, and contractors across its 122 weather forecast offices out on the street in the run-up to hurricane season. Local communities depend on the agency to be on top of its forecast game to determine storm tracks, wind speeds, and precipitation that help put teeth into evacuation orders or shelter-in-place advisories.
/snip
The private sector can’t match the value proposition of the National Weather Service, but companies work to entice Americans to pay up anyway. What happens if they can’t?
by Gabrielle Gurley May 20, 2025
When it comes to summer weather in the eastern half of the country, people either whine about the haze and heat, the humidity and the thunderstorms, or they debate the best free app to track what’s coming next.
Name brands like The Weather Channel and AccuWeather have free smartphone apps for the basics: high and low temperatures, sun or clouds or rain. More advanced hyperlocal alerts and frequent forecast updates or models will cost you. Clime, a newer offering, bills itself as an “all-in-one weather assistant” and offers freebies like current radar maps and seven-day forecasts. But severe weather “Clime PRO” add-ons like lightning or hurricane trackers will set you back $9.99 a week (which they call their “most popular” option) or $99.99 for the year.
For most people, it’s the zero-dollar options that get the highest praise. The National Weather Service (NWS) serves up weather and climate data free of charge for consumers, and for the businesses that create these weather apps. Don’t look for an NWS phone app: The agency doesn’t have one, though it does have a shortcut that takes a user to weather.gov, its portal for forecasts, watches and warnings, and other resources. But the broader effort to design a new mobile-friendly site has been thrown off-kilter: A beta version of that site notes that it has been “deactivated until further notice due to the loss of critical federal staff, which leaves this project without the resources required to continue its development or for routine monitoring and maintenance.”
Despite a treasure trove of public-facing weather intelligence, Americans may be headed toward the day when they have to pay for anything beyond the basics, and where your ability to know about imminent danger depends on how much money you have to spend on it.
The Trump administration’s scorched-earth march across the federal bureaucracy threw hundreds of NWS forecasters, researchers, and contractors across its 122 weather forecast offices out on the street in the run-up to hurricane season. Local communities depend on the agency to be on top of its forecast game to determine storm tracks, wind speeds, and precipitation that help put teeth into evacuation orders or shelter-in-place advisories.
Any new weather forecasting sector would be dominated by Big Tech, which has already shown a disposition toward monopolization.
/snip