Everyone seemed calm at the annual American Meteorological Society (AMS) conference here, sharing research and discussing public policy, until someone mentioned commercial weather data. Suddenly voices grew louder, one speaker interrupted another and tempers flared. As commercial companies expand their role in gathering and disseminating weather data, academic and government researchers are deeply concerned they will lose access to the data that fuels their work. These concerns, while not new, have been brought into sharp focus by the emergence of startups building constellations of cubesats focused on radio occultation, a valuable data set for atmospheric and space weather forecasts produced until recently by large government satellites that complied with Resolution 40, the World Meteorological Organization's policy of free and unrestricted data exchange.
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