This must be the season for private bills.
Sen. Santorum (R) of Pennsylvania has introduced a bill that would ban the federal government’s meteorologists from making this information available for free since that creates a problem for outfits like The Weather Channel and AccuWeather, which want to sell it.
Your tax dollars fund a massive apparatus of meteorological data collection for reasons ranging from agriculture to disaster safety to keeping airplanes in the air — everything under the sun.
Which pretty much covers why this bill is wrong. The only outfit that I know which does not simply republish the National Weather Service‘s data is Weatherbug, which instead siphons it from weather stations at local schools around the country.