AccuWeather and Barry Meyers

I just read the Fifth Risk by Michale Lewis. Part of the book is about Accuweather and Barry Meyers' attempt to make sure The National Weather Service can't use the data it has collected, paid by the taxpayers, to publicly communicate weather forecasts. Barry Meyers thinks that taxpayers should pay his company to get the forecasts instead. Fuck this guy.

Excerpts from The Fifth Risk:

Then there was AccuWeather. It had started out making its money by repackaging and selling National Weather Service information to gas companies and ski resorts. It claimed to be better than the National Weather Service at forecasting the weather, but what set it apart from everyone else was not so much its ability to predict the weather as to market it. As the private weather industry grew, AccuWeather’s attempts to distinguish itself from its competitors became more outlandish. In 2013, for instance, it began to issue a forty-five-day weather forecast.

In 2016 that became a ninety-day weather forecast. “We are in the realm of palm reading and horoscopes here, not science,” Dan Satterfield, a meteorologist on CBS’s Maryland affiliate, wrote. “This kind of thing should be condemned, and if you have an AccuWeather app on your smartphone, my advice is to stand up for science and replace it.”

Alone in the private weather industry, AccuWeather made a point of claiming that it had “called” storms missed by the National Weather Service. Here was a typical press release: “On the evening of Feb. 24, 2018, several tornadoes swept across northern portions of the Lower Mississippi Valley causing widespread damage, injuries and unfortunately some fatalities. . . . AccuWeather clients received pinpointed SkyGuard® Warnings, providing them actionable information and more“lead time than what was given by the government’s weather service in issuing public warnings and other weather providers who rely on government warnings . . .

All AccuWeather’s press releases shared a couple of problems: 1) there was no easy way to confirm them, as the forecasts were private, and the clients unnamed; and 2) even if true they didn’t mean very much. A company selling private tornado warnings can choose the predictions on which it is judged. When it outperforms the National Weather Service, it issues a press release bragging about its prowess. When it is outperformed by the National Weather Service it can lay low. But it is bound to be better at least every now and again: the dumb blackjack player is sometimes going to beat the card counter. “You have these anecdotes [from AccuWeather], but there is no data that says they are fundamentally improving on the National Weather Service tornado forecasts,” says David Kenny, chief executive of the Weather Company, a subsidiary of IBM, which, among other things, forecasts turbulence for most of the U.S. commercial airline industry.

By the 1990s, Barry Myers was arguing with a straight face that the National Weather Service should be, with one exception, entirely forbidden from delivering any weather-related knowledge to any American who might otherwise wind up a paying customer of AccuWeather. The exception was when human life and property was at stake. Even here Myers hedged. “The National Weather Service does not need to have the final say on warnings,” he told the consulting firm McKinsey, which made a study of the strangely fraught relationship between the private weather sector and the government. “The customer and the private sector should be able to sort that out. The government should get out of the forecasting business.

Pause a moment to consider the audacity of that maneuver. A private company whose weather predictions were totally dependent on the billions of dollars spent by the U.S. taxpayer to gather the data necessary for those predictions, and on decades of intellectual weather work sponsored by the U.S. taxpayer, and on international data-sharing treaties made on behalf of the U.S. taxpayer, and on the very forecasts that the National Weather Service generated, was, in effect, trying to force the U.S. taxpayer to pay all over again for what the National Weather Service might be able to tell him or her for free.

Later, AccuWeather’s strategy appeared, to those inside the Weather Service, to change. Myers spent more time interacting directly with the Weather Service. He got himself appointed to various NOAA advisory boards. He gave an AccuWeather board seat to Conrad Lautenbacher, who had run NOAA in the second Bush administration. He became an insistent presence in the lives of the people who ran the Weather Service. And wherever he saw them doing something that might threaten his profits, he jumped in to stop it. After the Joplin tornado, the Weather Service set out to build an app, to better disseminate warnings to the public. AccuWeather already had a weather app, Myers barked, and the government should not compete with it. (“Barry Myers is the reason we don’t have the app,” says a senior National Weather Service official.) In 2015, the Weather Company offered to help NOAA put its satellite data in the cloud, on servers owned by Google and Amazon. Virtually all the satellite data that came into NOAA wound up in places where no one could ever see it again. The Weather Company simply sought to render it accessible to the public. “Myers threatened to sue the Weather Service if they did it. “He stopped it,” said David Kenny. “We were willing to donate the technology to NOAA for free. We just wanted to do a science project to prove that we could.

Myers claimed that, by donating its time and technology to the U.S. government, the Weather Company might somehow gain a commercial advantage. The real threat to AccuWeather here was that many more people would have access to weather data. “It would have been a leap forward for all the people who had the computing power to do forecasts,” said Kenny. One senior official at the Department of Commerce at the time was struck by how far this one company in the private sector had intruded into what was, in the end, a matter of public safety. “You’re essentially taking a public good that’s been paid for with taxpayer dollars and restricting it to the privileged few who want to make money off it,” he said.”

One version of the future revealed itself in March 2015. The National Weather Service had failed to spot a tornado before it struck Moore, Oklahoma. It had spun up and vanished very quickly, but, still, the people in the Weather Service should have spotted it. AccuWeather quickly issued a press release bragging that it had sent a tornado alert to its paying corporate customers in Moore twelve minutes before the tornado hit. The big point is that AccuWeather never broadcast its tornado warning. The only people who received it were the people who had paid for it—and God help those who hadn’t. While the tornado was touching down in Moore, AccuWeather’s network channel was broadcasting videos of . . . hippos, swimming.

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