Re: ECMWF data on your website

Hello Colin,

> Dear Gilbert,
> 
> I'm the Data Licensing Manager at the Met Office in the UK. One of my
> roles is to license the use of ECMWF data (the UK is a Member State of
> ECMWF and contributes to the running of the Centre), and I have a number
> of commercial licensees in the USA. I note your use of ECMWF data which
> I assume you receive through NOAAPORT (?), and the general disclaimer
> that it is for academic use only and not for commercial/operational use.
> However, my licensees in the USA, who pay a significant amount of fee
> for their licenses to use the data commercially to create products and
> services for USA commerce and industry, are comcerned that you are able
> to make some of the data available in real time, and in some cases,
> ahead of the time they are able to get their products to the markets.

This may be true, however...

> The reason I suspect is that you use the data classified as WMO
> Essential which we distribute for ECMWF on the GTS to Washington, whilst
> they pay their license fee for much larger volumes on operational and
> ensemble model data which takes longer to deliver. Nevertheless, the
> vailability of the ECMWF data on your site ahead of their market
> products is disadvantaging them.

What we do is this: We do get the data from the U.S. NOAAport feed. We 
redistribute that only which is allowed and under the terms of WMO 
Resolution 40 (which has no time constraint), and only under the rules 
that it is to be used for educational, non-commercial purposes only. 
Therefore, I am in full compliance with copyright law and the 
international rules which I am legally bound by. Also, we do not 
provide raw access to the data; you can't even animate or "loop" the data.

> I do not wish to prevent you using the
> ECMWF data for this legitimate purpose, but I would like to ask if you
> can delay the availability of the ECMWF data on your site by at least 2
> hours to enable the licensees to fully exploit the commercial use of the
> data they are licensing from me. From an academic point of view,
> timeliness is not necessarily required, and the British Amospheric Data
> Centre, who distribute all the model output from ECMWF in the UK, agree
> to delay the availability of such data to research and academic users
> for this reason.

Unfortunately, that is impossible. I do not want to subvert what you are 
doing, but since the ECMWF data is received in a 12 hour delay over NCEP 
lines that are, to my understanding, not even faster than a modem...so I 
am finding difficulty how your data can be even slower.

That having been said, I am asking for an opinion from my upstream 
provider, UNIDATA, a branch of the U.S. National Science Foundation, who 
gives us the NOAAport feed at no charge to educational intitutions. Their 
decision will override mine. Let's see what they have to say and I will 
abide by their recommendations.

Thank you,

Gilbert

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Gilbert Sebenste                                                     ********
(My opinions only!)                                                  ******
Staff Meteorologist, Northern Illinois University                      ****
E-mail: address@hidden                                               ***
web: http://weather.admin.niu.edu                                      **
Work phone: 815-753-5492                                                *
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