Bleak forecast

Is the public being deprived of a better weather service because of government inefficiency and monopolistic behaviour? PAUL GORMAN investigates.

- PAUL GORMAN

Philip Duncan is emotional and exhausted.

After more than five years of battling politicians, regulators and anyone who will listen over the state of New Zealand's weather forecasting, he is almost ready to admit defeat.

As the founder and chief executive of New Zealand's largest and most successful private forecaster, Weather Watch, Duncan would love to give the government's own forecasters, MetService and the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (Niwa), a run for their money. The weather, he believes, is so important to our lives that top-quality forecasting is vital.

In other countries, such as Australia, the UK and the US, this means that competition is encouraged, and much public data about the weather - or even all of it - is provided to private forecasters for free (see graphic page 24). But not in New Zealand.

"The government here blocks innovation from the private weather sector," he says. "So we have the public demanding weather forecasters do better, but the government acting like it doesn't care."

The crux of the issue is that private forecasters can't afford to compete with government infrastructure and build their own network, says Duncan. "That's like saying, if someone sets up a new factory, and the state-owned power company didn't support them, then they should go and build a hydro-electric dam to power the factory. Nowhere on Earth has any private forecaster had to do that. To build our own radar network and observations network would cost us tens of millions of dollars."