Governmental Services and Social Media : When Weather Becomes Global

• The first weather services commenced 150 years ago as small networks of telegraphic stations exchanged weather information in order to provide storm warnings. For larger scale operations, development of weather services and meteorology as a science, larger investments were necessary. The weather industry was shaped by the industrial information economy and for a long period of time dominated by governmental services, with the governmental sector as the sole investor. Eventually a new role – that of service providers – developed. However, different data access policies developed in the U.S. and Europe, resulting in widely different roles of the same agents, impacting local weather markets. Social media technology and changed communication practices of the 21st century, with millions of potential weather observation points, is here hypothesized to impact governmental services while re-shaping the market for weather and alert services. Additionally, the weather information market is transforming from a high entry barrier market to offering more sophisticated tools and data at low cost. The rise of new, and in particular social, media will inevitably impact the roles of different agents of the present weather market. The paper performs an analysis of the weather market and its societal benefits under different conditions and role distributions, and finally develops several future scenarios following from the inclusion of social media as an agent in the weather market.

Nyckelord

Weather

Governmental services

Meteorology

Social media

Scenarios

Publikations- och innehållstyp

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