Author: Dr. R.E.W. Pettifer, General Secretary, PRIMET

The paper, , was presented to the 7th Eastern European e|Gov Days: eGovernment & eBusiness Ecosystem & eJustice April (22) - 23 - 24, 2009 Prague, Czech Republic.

The abstract for the paper comments,

“…that among all of the possible sources of Public Sector Information (PSI) that can be exploited commercially, meteorological data is one of those potentially most easily accessed, understood and used. All operational meteorological data are exchanged in one or other of a range of internationally agreed and understood formats and almost all of it has a full complement of metadata associated with it. It should be among the easiest of all PSI to exploit for the greater good of the economy as a whole. On the other hand, successful exploitation depends, in many cases, upon access, in near real time, to data sets that span national borders.

Some attempts have been made to deal with these characteristics and to set up arrangements that enable data from most European countries to be made available for commercial exploitation. However, the facts that in each nation there is only one source of supply for the data (the National Meteorological Service, NMHS) and that in many countries these same Services derive some of their core funding from exploiting the same data in the commercial market place, create a distortion in the trading circumstances that restricts the competitive development of the market through wholesale pricing, internal cross subsidisation and restrictions on data supply and its use.

As a result, Europe is annually losing 100’s of millions of Euro in net taxation revenues and seeing virtually no significant net growth in the value added end user market in weather products.

This paper examines some of these issues and identifies some of the problems in greater detail.”