Cloud of uncertainty over weather services merger

He says combining the two organisations makes complete sense but the detail of how it’s done will determine its success or otherwise.

Duncan is critical of NIWA, which in his opinion hasn’t produced anything of value to the public in the past decade. He adds that NIWA, unlike MetService, isn’t keen on working with private sector companies such as his.

Duncan says MetService was much the same until the arrival of a new chief executive four years ago.

“Now the new management at MetService have completely turned things around and are giving us access to rain radar and data that in the past we were stopped from using,” he told Dairy News.

“We’re a little apprehensive that this may end up happening again in any new organisation because NIWA doesn’t see us in the same light as the MetService. That’s why we hope the Commerce Commission gets involved because you can’t have a commercial monopoly calling the shots,” he says.

Duncan believes that one thing that will improve weather forecasting in rural NZ is NIWA and other organisations freely sharing the data on which they base their forecasts.

He says NIWA will tell you what the weather will be like in any given month, but they won’t share the data that this is based on.

He says there is no way that a member of the public can effectively scrutinise any given forecast.

He says it would be far more valuable to farmers if they could have ready access to such data.

“A lot of farmers don’t want to listen to someone in Wellington telling them what will happen on their farm because the chances are it won’t be accurate. But if they had access to things like historical data, they would be able to put together a forecast that is specific to their block of land and would be much more beneficial,” he says.

Duncan says it’s interesting that government weather forecasting organisations in the US, UK, Canada, Ireland, Japan and Australia do share data.

“We seem to be the only ones who don’t,” he says.

Duncan says he won’t be making any submissions to government ministers on the merger – he’s given up trying to communicate with them. He says few if any understand the issues and others just blindly take the advice of their officials.

“Dealing with ministers has been a painful process and I am not going through that again. You send them an email and they take forever to respond and when they do, they clearly miss the point of that initial email,” he says.

Duncan says he’s not holding his breath about what the merger may turn out to be and says the only hope is that the Commerce Commission does the right thing.