Resources of the Week
By Shirl Kennedy, Deputy Editor
-------------------------------------- Whither the Weather
Can you believe The Weather Channel has been around since 1982? Even more remarkable is that a television channel devoted to nothing but the weather 24/7/365 could survive for all these years, much less prosper. And yet it has. People are, in general, fascinated by weather phenomena, and we've come to depend on the availability of up-to-date weather info. Here in Florida during the hurricane season, we tend to get up close and personal with The Weather Channel; we know that when Jim Cantore shows up on a beach anywhere close to where we live, it's time to run for our lives.
Then there's the Web. Looking for weather information is one of the most common online activities for everyone. The National Weather Service (NWS) website is a jewel, of course. It runs broad and deep, offering a staggering amount of data that is useful to almost everyone, from the office worker wondering if he or she should take an umbrella to work today to farmers, fisherman, pilots and others whose livelihood is critically tied to meteorology.
Not surprisingly, there has been an ongoing uproar since Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA) introduced the National Weather Services Duties Act of 2005 in the Senate last April which, according to the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF), "would ban NWS from 'competing' with private entities by making it unlawful for the agency to publish user-friendly weather data and barring NWS experts from speaking one-on-one to news agencies." The end result, according to the EFF, and other entities and concerned individuals -- who generally feel that the wording of Santorum's bill is extremely vague -- is that we could end up paying for our weather data twice, since the NWS is a taxpayer-supported government agency. Seems to me that this is an issue worth keeping on our radar screen in the information profession.
At any rate, I spent some time prowling around the Web, looking at a few other countries' national weather/meteorological service sites, just to see what they were offering. Maybe you'll be interested as well.
The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) is "(t)he UN system's authoritative voice on the state and behaviour of the Earth's atmosphere, its interaction with the oceans, the climate it produces and the resulting distribution of water resources." It has a membership of 187 countries and territories; you'll find links to their National Weather Services sites, if available. Some things worth browsing here:
+ Publications of the World Meteorological Association 2005. Includes direct links to the full text.
+ MeteoWorld, the WMO's bi-monthly newsletter.
+ WMO Technical Library. Offers an OPAC; a list of recent acquisitions (by subject area: Agricultural Meteorology, Climatology, Education & Training, Environmental Studies, Hydrology, Marine Meteorology, Observations & Instruments, Tropical Meteorology, Weather Analysis & Forecasting, General Works); a small collection of specialized, vetted links in such topic areas as Agrometeorology, Global Warming, and Ozone & UVB.
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