[pinkmuffinere]

Referring to the parent comment, the data which NOAA isn’t able to buy is the government’s data, which is freely provided to non-government organizations. The parent comment doesn’t discuss personal data very much. I think this misunderstanding might be the root cause of your disagreement.

[counters]

Parent comment is mis-informed. NOAA doesn't have to buy any data from other government agencies or organizations. It's all open and publicly available. There are challenges around the reliability and quality of data that NOAA doesn't take efforts itself to curate and maintain which limit their utility, but that's a separate issue.

More importantly, NOAA explicitly funds the National Mesonet Program [1] to actively identify, acquire, consume, and ingest data from a wide variety of state and federal agencies across the country. The NMP itself partners with a major private sector company, Synoptic Data PBC [2] to perform the engineering necessary to acquire all this data. Synoptic actively maintains the infrastructure which consumes and publishes this data to MADIS for use by NOAA and any other stakeholder.

[1]: https://nationalmesonet.us/ [2]: https://synopticdata.com/