It’s a little bit ironic that these private companies purposely mislead the public as to the source of their data and now are faced with limits to their access to that data.
representatives at forecasting giants like AccuWeather, private weather data services like the Commodity Weather Group, and hobbyists like TropicalTidBits.com, and all said that such a change could be disastrous for their respective practices.
That’s bullshit. They created the infrastructure constraints when they designed their systems and failed to forecast demand. How is this anything more than a simple budgetary issue? It seems blindingly obvious that a public service provider should secure delivery before spending on service development.
What, the journalist just ate that without realizing it wasn’t chocolate? The users are in no way responsible for the bottleneck, they just exposed it, as users do.
I agree, making this data available is precisely the NWS mission.
The linked WP article is more critical of the NWS then the one in the OP.
“It is not clear why the NWS is considering these harmful bandwidth restrictions given the massive scalability of content delivery network (CDN) technology, cloud infrastructure and other technology solutions that are currently available,”
These weather apps are operated by commercial companies which make money from data they get for free, the US government could be within it’s rights to cap access from commercial operators and perhaps charge them a fee to remove the cap.
Looks like NOAA is working on the problem:
The NOAA Big Data Program (BDP) will provide public access to NOAA’s open data on commercial cloud platforms through public-private partnerships. These partnerships will remove obstacles to the public use of NOAA data, help avoid costs and risks associated with federal data access services, and leverage operational public-private partnerships with the cloud computing and information services industries.