Well as referred to in Bob's post, apps that gather weather data rely on local weather services maintaining compliance. So whether your weather extra works largely depends on where you are and what service feeds your location.
On a related note, an
article in today's NYTimes ends on this note:
One of the most important and contentious struggles, mentioned here last spring, appears to be turning out in a way that will burnish the Bush administration's pro-tech record. This is the "fair weather" controversy. The question at its core is whether the National Weather Service, which uses taxpayer funds to collect nearly all weather readings, will be allowed to make its information available through the Internet - or instead required to sluice it all to commercial weather services, as the S.E.C. once did with Mead.
The famous Circular A-130 argued strongly for Internet distribution, as did a special study of the question by the National Research Council in 2003. The weather service went ahead with such sites - and they have proved enormously popular. During the three months last fall when four hurricanes struck the South, weather service sites received nine billion hits - breaking a government record of six billion hits on NASA sites in the three months after the Mars rover landing last spring.
From an interest in aviation, I often visit the weather service's marvelous Aviation Digital Data Web site, at adds.aviationweather.noaa.gov. Without a doubt, it has saved many lives by making it easy for pilots to understand where the dangers from icing, thunderstorms and turbulence are. Last fall, the government invited public comment on the weather service's new strategy and received overwhelming support. Just after the election, the service announced that it would officially embrace an open-information policy.
BUT the Commercial Weather Services Association, the industry's trade group, has complained that such sites violate an agreement from the pre-Internet era. By their argument, the taxpayers should continue to pay for all the weather balloons and monitoring stations - but should not be allowed to get the results directly from government sites.
"We feel that they spend a lot of their funding and attention on duplicating products and services that already exist in the private sector," Barry Lee Myers, executive vice president of AccuWeather, says of the weather service. "And they are not spending the kind of time and effort that is needed on catastrophic issues that involve lives and property, which I think is really their true function."
He added that the weather service might have done a better, faster job of warning about the southern Asian tsunami if it had not been distracted in this way. Senator Rick Santorum, Republican of Pennsylvania, where AccuWeather is based, has supported the industry group's position. A spokesman said Mr. Santorum would introduce legislation to "help" the weather service "continue providing meteorological infrastructure, forecasts and warnings, rather than providing services already effectively provided by the private sector." In other words, taking down those Web sites that the stealth High-Tech Administration has helped create.
