COMMUNITY: The Private Sector In Meteorology - An Update

Abstract

J ust over a decade has now passed since I prepared a chapter on “A History of Private Sector Meteorology” for the AMS publication, Historical Essays on Meteorology, 1919–1995, which was published in 1996 as part of the 75th anniversary of AMS. In the intervening years, rapid advancements have been made in meteorological instrumentation, remote sensing, and model development, as well as in communication and delivery systems, resulting in significant changes for the private sector. This update on the state of the private sector, based on additional data, reflects many of those changes and I hope it will help the community answer the requests from the media, commercial, and public interests about the extent and role of the private sector in meteorology. The scope of this survey, which I conducted in 2006, is limited to the private-sector meteorology business (industrial meteorology) in the United States, meaning that specific customers of privatesector firms who use weather and climate services provided by the private sector (such as forecasts, instrumentation, remote-sensing equipment, etc.) were not part of the survey. I e-mailed a questionnaire to a main contact at 109 firms; 40 responded. For some firms, where follow-up did not produce a response, I obtained information from Web sites. I did not send questionnaires to TV broadcast meteorologists—broadcast meteorology is too vast a field for a detailed survey within this project. Furthermore, my 1995 assessment of the private sector did not include TV meteorology, as Roy Leep covered it in a separate study for the AMS in Historical Essays. Nonetheless, an estimation of the size of the broadcast field was possible. The three-page questionnaire requests information about the number of meteorologists and Certified Consulting Meteorologists at each company and their work. It also asks about products, services, industries served, and annual U.S. revenues. In all, 250 meteorological firms of various sizes were identified as commercial meteorological firms, including independent consulting meteorologists. In 1995, I identified 10 segments of the private sector, and there seem to be few additions (shown in bold in table 1) to that scheme today.