A friend of mine who works in a business that involves weather forecasts asks to remain anonymous but wants me to post the following…
Some of the private weather forecasting companies employ a very simple trick. Let's say the N.W.S. [National Weather Service] says it's going to be 78 degrees tomorrow in Los Angeles. Now, they don't mean 78 everywhere. It might be 77 at your house. It might be 80 ten blocks away. That is still an accurate forecast. The final recorded temperature might be 77 or 79.
So the private company doesn't say it will be 78. They just say 79. There's a 50-50 chance they will be right. None of their clients will complain about inaccurate forecasts but the company will be able to say, "Half the time, we're more accurate than the National Weather Service." What they don't say is that, first of all, they did no forecasting at all to come up with that "more accurate" prediction. And they won't reveal that they were only "more accurate" by one degree and in an utterly meanginless way.
There is some good work being done by private weather firms. Some of them develop their own computer models. For a given forecast, the N.W.S. might consult three or four different models. The private firm throws yet another into the mix and sometimes, the additional model makes their forecast a little more accurate but only a little. In any case, they couldn't do what they do without the N.W.S. model and the kind of proposal that Rick "man on dog" Santorum was pushing was just an attempt to help private industry make money. It's like how they don't want Medicare to be able to negotiate with drug companies. They want the drug company to get as much of that government money as it can. It is fine to tax lower and middle income people. This is why tax-hating Republican leaders never want to cut payroll taxes. They like having that money collected as long as it somehow winds up going to rich people.
The private weather companies do have much to offer. They wouldn't be in business if they didn't. Some of them are especially good at giving individual, personal information to a company to aid them with their planning. But as I read these articles wherein G.O.P. leaders are suggesting the government get out of charting and predicting the weather, I don't think they get how much the private companies rely on the N.W.S. and how good a job the N.W.S. does. Some people are carping because in their area, Irene wasn't as destructive as the National Weather Service said it could well be. Those folks are expecting a precision they will never get from any weather service, public or private.