Private weather organizations and the founding of the United States Weather Bureau

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: University of Richmond
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC HISTORY
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0022-0507
• DOI: 10.1017/S0022050700024141
• 发表日期: 1999
• 页码: 1063-1071

摘要

In late-twentieth-century America, both the National Weather Service and private weather organizations provide weather services. Although commercially successful, private weather organizations do not bear the full costs of supplying their services, since they receive nearly all of their meteorological data from the National Weather Service at essentially zero cost.(1) No private weather organization in the United States owns a weather satellite, for example. Any investigation into the socially optimal system of delivering weather-information services requires an understanding of the historical provision of those services. On 9 February 1870 President Ulysses S. Grant signed the Congressional joint resolution authorizing the Secretary of War to establish a network of observation stations in order to provide storm warnings on the Great Lakes and the Atlantic Seaboard.(2) The Army Signal Service began providing storm warnings and forecasts the following year for no fee. Did the establishment of the United States Weather Bureau in 1870 replace an already existing weather-forecast system? Were private weather organizations unsuccessful in collecting enough revenue to cover their costs? Or did the growth of commerce, especially on the Great Lakes and the Atlantic Seaboard, raise the expected value of storm warnings enough so that by the late 1870s, a private weather organization of efficient scale would have been created in the absence;of the Weather Bureau? This note provides answers to these questions. Two general hypotheses offer differing explanations as to why the government, rather than a private organization, provided the fist self-sustaining weather forecast service in the United States. First, weather forecasts may possess qualities characterizing a public good. If the nonrivalrous or nonexcludable nature of weather information was severe enough, private organizations may have been unable to support a socially useful service, or the private service may have been inefficiently limited in size. Second, investors and potential users may not have been convinced initially that the available technology could provide a valuable service. One extension of this view is that the Federal government could test the feasibility of a weather forecasting system more cheaply or was persuaded more readily, for political or scientific reasons, that weather forecasts were both feasible and worthwhile.