I made it work law n° 78-753 of July 17, 1978 to get a whole bunch of numbers from Météo-France.

This law is a brilliant thing, which " recognizes the right of any person to obtain communication of documents held within the framework of his public service mission by an administration, whatever their form or medium. »

Ironically, it is also this same law that authorizes MF to sell its data.

In short, after a little waiting and a few reminders, I just received what I wanted. A day later and I would have had the right to appeal to the EACH.

So now I can officially say that meteo-parapente.com has many more users than the section " Aerology / Gliding "OfAeroweb. But that, we suspected.

The big surprise is that at this rate, by the end of the summer, there will probably be more people who will consult the Météo-Parapente made by an amateur unaware that the weather " light aviation » official – all categories combined! There we say to ourselves that there is still something wrong...

But in the series of numbers, there are plenty of other surprises. In fact I expected to make a rather sad observation, but not to this point.

The record is the share of royalties collected in 2010 for observation data, which is …………… 0%.

No one bought sighting data from MF in 2010!!?? As the sum is rounded to the nearest %, that leaves us with 10k€ of doubts, but still! They do slightly better in other years, with ~60 to 80k€ / year. Which isn't much left.

Finally arrives the info that interested me the most: the one on the models.

So we remember, when I wanted to have access to the fine model AROME to do Weather-Paragliding, MF asked me € 80. And there I discovered that in 2013, the sale of data " models reported the tidy sum of €90. And this is the best year!

So if mom and dad had wanted to sell the house, I could have bought AROME's data and therefore doubled MF's turnover all by myself! Yes okay, that's just the turnover " models is a bit of a cheat to make a catchy title.

However, this brings us to the famous question...

Because if I calculate correctly, the packs “ Data from a global atmospheric model “to €120 +” Data from a limited-area atmospheric model at €80, that's €000, or a little more than €200 in turnover.

Same for the " RADOME package 1 or 2 years “, the “observations” pack also more expensive than the turnover of the last 4 years.

Precipitation radars are doing a little better, and again…” Subscription to the national mosaic annual package is billed at €100, or even €000 if you want the right to broadcast the images on the internet. Revenues amounted to €150 in 000, compared to €180 in 000.

Admittedly, these receipts are probably derived from sales by cutting. But the problem appears quite clearly: Météo-France does not sell its data. Or rather, there are no customers.

In fact, only climatology brings in a little money, between 65 and 85% of the royalties collected. But it's sales season: −42% since 2010.

Apart (perhaps?) the commercial branch of MF (not counted here), no one seems to have bought an entire dataset. And yet, it is not the uses that would be lacking. I'm the first to know, and just look at the proliferation of American data all over the web.

Faced with such a finding, a large number of arguments crumble. There are no longer any excuses for not turning on the taps.

I'm a bit overbooked here. But believe me, as soon as I have some time I will seriously look into the subject!

We cannot communicate by saying that " the new supercomputer will save the economy 10 billion a year ", if at the same time an entire sector is prevented from developing, by blocking access to the data, all that to recover the fags.

I invite you to read the Advocacy for free European data » just published by my colleague Francis Fustier.

We will console ourselves all the same by saying that it is " grace to this blockage that I embarked on this weather adventure, and that without it, I would have had so much less fun!

The first supercomputerOpen Weather, in my room with the parents, a little less than 2 years ago. I had installed 3 ADSL lines − in addition to the family one − to send the results to the server.

"If you don't want to give me your estimates, I'll do mine!" »