When IBM purchased TWC, IBM summarily cancelled our heretofore free weather station monitoring through
Wunderground.com. Instead IBM offered to “sell” us our own remote data center weather stations information back to us at an exorbitant price. No thank you. We switched everything to
Ambient.com.
The idea of
Wunderground.com was free public collection and sharing of useful weather data to vastly increase the density of coverage over commercial services. It’s a pity IBM, who otherwise supports
open source through it’s vast Linux contributions, couldn’t see that.
During the Santa Barbara fires last year, our weather station on Gibraltar Peak was the one source firefighting helicopter pilots had to obtain ridge wind speeds, which was critical to their operation. Neither the NWS nor TWC or IBM is willing
to invest in critical public information infrastructure. I’m a capitalist, but I don’t believe destroying the good works of others is ultimately profitable.
-mel
According to this, Weather Underground was purchased by the Weather Channel and firmed “The Weather Company”, and that was in turn purchased by IBM last year.