STORM2K

There have been several stories in the news this week about misinterpretation and irresponsible reposts of certain snowfall models.

Maybe they should go to subscription only for Pro-Mets with licensing/copyright restrictions on who can repost them and where?

I never understand the idea of restricting access to data. There were some groups in the dark ages that tried this, for pretty much the same reason. Didn't work out so well. The answer is education, not restriction IMO. If someone thinks they will get 20 inches of snow because the GFS snow clown map says so ... so be it.

Its simple. Tax paying citizens pay for US run models (GFS, NAM, RAP, ect). We own them. They are in the public domain. They cannot be restricted without a major change in US copyright law.

There are quite a few US Gov't documents and services that are not available to the general public, but the models in question are from non-US sources.

Yes there are exemptions to the public domain part of copyright law, but those apply to confidential or classified information. Weather models clearly don't fall into that category.

As for non-sources, most of them are already pretty restricted without licensing. I think the Canadian is pretty open, but models such as the Euro are quite restricted without dropping $250,000 a year for a license, or in the case of sites like Weatherbell, Accuweather, WSI, ect pay a subscription to get a sub-license from them.

A lot of the stuff on facebook from the last week was Euro data from Weatherbell which was posted as a major breaking of the terms and conditions. Ryan Maue (from weatherbell) already has made it clear that continuous posting of Euro data on social media sites will lead to that persons account on Weatherbell being ended.