This week, the Government finally pulled its finger out and announced a review of New Zealand’s national weather forecasting services and of the muddle the sector has become, largely due to Crown research institute Niwa moving in on the work of state-owned enterprise MetService.
We say "the Government", but perhaps more accurately we should say "a government", given several have quite happily ignored over the past almost 10 years the growing confusion of having two taxpayer-funded organisations competing over weather forecasting. As many weather pundits have pointed out, we don’t have two police forces, or two government roading agencies building their own competing state highway networks, so why should we tolerate the very much larger Niwa going head-to-head with the smaller MetService?
One of the most gobsmacking failures of any government on this issue has been allowing Niwa to blithely charge ahead unchecked.
It beggars belief that the CRI never sought government approval for setting up Niwa Weather in 2013, and that former Labour minister of research, science and innovation Megan Woods later said Niwa’s move was purely an operational one which did not require ministerial agreement.
As a consequence of successive governments’ head-in-the-sand approach, there is now the ever-present threat that, as severe weather speeds towards the country, New Zealanders don’t know whether to listen to and trust MetService — charged by the World Meteorological Organisation with being the official source of weather warnings — or Niwa.
According to MBIE, the review will focus on finding the "most efficient and effective arrangements for the provision of national weather research, observation, modelling, forecasting, warning, severe weather impacts, data access, and communication services".
Once the reviewer has worked out where the responsibilities should lie, then there may be changes to MetService and Niwa. While MBIE doesn’t go into details on this, it could result in a single new entity or some kind of amalgamation in several stages. The review is also looking at the vexed question of open access to weather data for competitors and the public, which an earlier report found was among the most restrictive in the Western world. The document released this week contained some thought-provoking statements, including that the traditional line between climate and weather is becoming increasingly irrelevant, as what were once-every-10- or 20 or 100-year storms become more frequent.
Weather forecasting itself is also changing. As good as the various computer models are, they all struggle to accurately predict at a local scale the kind of severe storms which often are the most dangerous and do the most damage. Judging by the review’s terms of reference, this looks like it will be a serious attempt to rectify a concerning situation. However, previous attempts to sort things out have failed or been shelved.
In 2006, seven years before Niwa Weather was even born, a review of MetService and Niwa recommended a merger, because collaboration was not taking place. The Labour government failed to act, and instead got both to sign a memorandum of understanding, which lapsed in 2017 after another decade of little collaboration, made difficult by the agencies’ adherence to different commercial imperatives and aspects of competition law.
The best short-term outcome from this new review might be for MetService absorbs Niwa Weather into its forecasting and communications operation. That would ensure simple, clear messaging in life-threatening weather. Longer term, sometime in the next few years, perhaps a new agency is needed which focuses more on forecasting and warning about severe weather and its impacts in a world in climate crisis. The sunny, warm days can look after themselves. But that’s just a punt, not a prediction.
