Our Association has been confronted with a lot of problems our members have been facing due to the development of the pricing-strategy for meteorological data. On the TV-side - the number of new TV-channels has been exploding - there was an enormous movement in the whole media-scene. Luckily for all TV-weather- presenters - the weather-report has become even more important than ever, but at the same time the availability of meteorological data at reasonable prices has become more questionable than ever.

The members of our Association are the public face of the "weather-industry" and have to deliver weather-reports to a huge community all around the world. No one better than we on the forefront know that our task is very difficult, because we should be like a news-presenter on one side, to deliver as much information as possible, to explain sudden weather-events, to predict weather as good as possible which means we have to handle the weather-information in a serious and responsible manner, and finally we should be an entertainer on the other side, some might entertain too much, some not enough at all. Anyway to combine both qualities is not so easy.

But in any case it is quite clear that the credibility of the weather-report is very much influenced by the credibility of the presenter, who is very much influenced of course by his personal capabilities to understand and handle weather-information but to the same extent on the reliable information he receives.

As most of the weather-departments are associated with the news, every presenter has to deal with certain weather-occasions somewhere around the world, where he might not be familiar with. As soon as the TV-station receives material to be in the broadcast, the weather-presenter might find himself to speak the comment, because he would be the only person to know about certain weather circumstances. So he really needs to have serious information.

Weather is not a static situation which stays for days or month, it is closely related to an ever changing atmosphere, and does not stop on boundaries, even if some Met. services would like the weather behaving like that. These facts are creating a vast amount of weather-data. The presenter’s task is, to evaluate some data in order to extract the best information for the audience. If you predict heavy rains and thunderstorms for a summer-weekend you could easily stop people from going somewhere, recreation and swimming-areas would be empty. Even if the weather would turn out to be just the opposite, it could take perhaps ¾ of the day for most of the people changing their mind about the activity-planning.

Especially during this year with the upcoming of El Nino, almost every presenter has been confronted with this question, or with the forest-fires in Indonesia. I have seen a lot of information being distributed through the press-agencies which has been wrong. For a lot of colleges not professional meteorologists an information from the local Met. service would do much better.

The presenter is very much dependent on serious information no matter whether it is a written text including all information or just the raw data he has to sort out by himself, the output should be top quality, because a lack of information would reflect the credibility of the entire weather-industry - public and private.

In these times where every institution looks for possible means to save money, a lot of our TV-colleges are under pressure, when they have to pay too much for their meteorological data. At least a restriction in the supply of weather-data will lead to less accurate weather-forecasts and will leave the presenter with the image of not being reliable and will strike back to the whole industry. Therefore time has come to discuss that package in both ways - TV-stations, TV-meteorologists and National Met. services in order to use this public face of the weather-industry" for the benefit of - the audience, who has paid already with tax money, and the whole weather- industry.

Inge Niedek, Broadcast Meteorologist for ZDF (German state TV)