To free or not to free: The debate over public access to weather data

Should raw scientific data—particularly weather data, which impacts everyone—be freely distributed to the public? Or should it be carefully processed first by authorities to ensure its accuracy? 

It mostly depends on what you mean by “free”.

The DOST, which supervises both Project NOAH and PAGASA, has a Data Sharing Policy which acknowledges that publicly-funded research data is “produced In the public interest and should therefore be accessible to the maximum extent possible” even while  also enabling the agency to “restrict the release of proprietary data (and) maintain confidentiality of proprietary Information.”

PAGASA data: By request only

When asked about the availability of raw weather data on the PAGASA website, PAGASA Weather Division Operations Chief Esperanza Cayanan admits that the website does not have a publicly-accessible archive of its own raw data. 

“All we have in the website are the data for the tropical cyclones in the past years. Researchers who want specific data are referred to our (offline) data bank,” she said. 

According to Cayanan, raw data should only be given to vetted organizations or entities that have the technical expertise to handle the information properly. 

Unlike its international counterparts, PAGASA judiciously restricts access to its raw data, which can only be retrieved if a researcher personally goes to the agency's archives for it. 

At the PAGASA offices, there are prominent posters explaining the process for requesting data: after filling out a form, you have to pay an access fee. This can vary from P36 to as much as P1,000, depending on the information requested. 

However, Cayanan assured that the fee can be waived if the researcher is a student with sufficient training or is working on behalf of an allied organization.

There are important reasons behind such austere gatekeeping.

“When people request for raw data, they are requesting for satellite images in the form of pixels. Not everyone from the public will be able to understand what pixels are. Why not process it first and then later on release the data that everybody can understand?” points out volcanologist Raymond Patrick Maximo. 

“As for the technical people, they can come to the respective office and ask for the raw data,” he adds. 

Is it really 'free'?

Not everyone subscribes to this definition of “free data”, however.

“If an employee needs to personally look into a specific data request, then technically, it's not free. The fact that it needs to be requested and granted means that it's not readily available,” geoscience specialist Sam Lesan said on Facebook.

This has been borne out by other researchers' experiences when requesting information from PAGASA.

“On the surface, it may seem easy to get data from PAGASA, but they will keep relaying you to different offices,” one student researcher said. 

“For example, I needed rainfall data from my thesis. My adviser told me to go to the PAGASA library. When I arrived at the library, they told me to go to the Climate Archives. Then the Climate Archives staff told me to go back to the library. They redirected me back and forth,” he said. 

And even when he finally got what he needed, he said he was disappointed to find that the data wasn't machine readable: you couldn't just plug the data into a computer and crunch the numbers.

“You’d be expecting a Microsoft Word or Excel file, at the very least. The data they gave was in ASCII text, like the ones you see in html codes. They even gave a short window time. I could only request two or three months’ worth of rainfall data from PAGASA,” he lamented. 

In the end, he downloaded rainfall data from PAGASA's international counterparts, such as the US' JTWC and Japan's JMA—a common practice for many students and researchers outside of PAGASA looking to learn more about the Philippines' weather records. 

“It’s because it’s easier to get data from other countries,” another student researcher lamented.

The experts' mandate

For her part, Cayanan underscored the value and necessity of trained experts in dealing with raw data.

“Bakit kami magbibigay ng raw data to the public kung kaming nasa operations ang gagamit nito at magpo-produce ng weather forecast? (Ang public ba) ang gagawa ng forecast, sila ba gagawa ng analysis?” she said.

“(PAGASA is) the mandated agency (for interpreting weather data),” Cayanan stressed, emphasizing the need for data to be closely scrutinized and to undergo quality control by experts in the field.

For Cayanan and others in PAGASA, this means that the raw data first has to be processed by qualified meteorologists before being released to the public.

Upholding open data standards

This stands in contrast with the “Open Data” stance espoused by Project NOAH. 

“The NOAH scientists believe in Open Data and people empowerment and have been working hard to deliver the output of all the projects under NOAH, free of charge, viewable and downloadable in the NOAH website (noah.dost.gov.ph),” wrote the Project NOAH team in its blog.

“Knowledge is open if anyone is free to access, use, modify, and share it — subject, at most, to measures that preserve provenance and openness. Open data is data that can be freely used, shared and built-on by anyone, anywhere, for any purpose,” according to the Open Knowledge Foundation, which spearheads the global initiative for governments—including the Philippines—to adopt open data standards. 

But with Project NOAH's days numbered, it remains to be seen which paradigm—“open data” or “responsible curation,” or even perhaps a happy compromise between the two—will prevail as PAGASA moves forward with its modernization. — TJD, GMA News