Stuff spoke to former Revenue Minister Peter Dunne, who said:
According to Labour MP Clare Curran, MetService is the official forecaster for New Zealand, recognised by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) as the weather authority for New Zealand’s civil emergency events.
NIWA had no authority to take highly profitable work away from MetService and continues to poach valuable business without authority from the Crown.
History
In a Herald article of July 2013, Jim Salinger said it was “time to end this expensive duplication of climate researchers working for two Crown-owned entities.”
In the Stuff article, the Minister of Research, Science and Innovation, Dr Megan Woods, says: “NIWA has provided weather services alongside MetService since 2005.” But in the same story, NIWA adds 13 years to that, claiming to have “been involved in weather forecasting” since its establishment during Simon Upton’s science reforms in 1992, 27 years ago.
Environmental scientist Dr Murray Boardman told Stuff, “NIWA does think of itself as the pre-eminent CRI. The problem is that successive ministers in New Zealand have not had the fortitude to stand up to NIWA.”
No other nation would fund two organisations providing identical services from the public purse, yet we’ve been doing it for nearly 30 years.
Under Mr Upton’s blueprint, weather, climate, hydrological and atmospheric science were to be carried out by the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA). But, as Salinger explains:
Salinger gives a good description of the overlap between NIWA and the MetService:
Unfortunately, in New Zealand, the regional councils have to pick up the heavy rainfall forecasts, with a time delay and plug into their own hydrological models, which vary in quality, depending on what they can afford.
All of this when they could be using models provided by the combined might of NIWA and the Met Service. Our rivers respond extremely rapidly to heavy rainfall, so any delay is a threat to life and property.
So splitting scientific endeavours not only wastes money and resources, but consequent delays in presenting the data are potentially lethal.
This was officially investigated two years ago
WeatherWatch posted a story in January 2018 saying they welcomed the prospect of “more sunlight and transparency” on the MetService/NIWA agency double-up, since NIWA continually refuse to comment (we’ve seen a lot of that behaviour from NIWA).
But wait, there’s more.
Buying new super-computers – twice
In the last 15 years, NIWA has purchased two super-computers to perform these unauthorised weather forecasts. They’re a pseudo-limited company with Crown privileges and undoubtedly their own resources, but in addition they receive over $120 million in Crown funds annually, so will they disclose the amount of taxpayer funds they spent and still spend on weather forecasts, including these amazing computers?
August 2009
Note the language in this NIWA puff piece, just four years after muscling in on MetService territory. Nobody would know this has anything to do with weather forecasts, since it’s all about “climate research.” They mention “environmental forecasting,” “investments in science,” “most powerful climate research supercomputer in the Southern Hemisphere,” “climate-sensitive” industries (no, it’s actually weather they’re sensitive to, you can’t feel the climate), improving “early warnings of the effects of severe events” (more weather events, obviously), and “severe weather-related events.”
They blatantly pretend this is all about “climate”, not weather forecasting, and of course there’s no competition with the MetService.
But then…
Just nine years later they think they’re home safe so they spend over 40% more on yet another super-computer and boast openly that it’s going to revolutionise weather forecasting, all pretence abandoned:
May 2018
This is not rocket science. Our Coalition Government just needs the backbone to bring to heel the inflated egos running NIWA’s maverick weather forecasting service, stop them engaging in unauthorised business and pass the assets over to MetService, as Simon Upton intended in the first place.
But I find it odd that Salinger now turns on NIWA.
Visits: 199
Hills? Clouds? Ocean? — from MetService website
A curious climate scandal was raised this week by one of our long-time favourite readers, biologist Dr Maggy Wassilieff (here is her comment).
Maggy reports on an article in the Sunday Star-Times by Paul Gorman, who describes the extraordinary duplication of national weather forecasting by both the MetService and the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA), both Crown Research Institutes (CRI).
As an aside, I must say how pleased I am to see a Stuff journalist inquiring into matters of climate—truly exciting, like spotting a unicorn.
Stuff makes the astonishing discovery (that turns out to be a rediscovery) that the duplication of effort is caused by NIWA moving into the territory of a sister CRI without permission.