1. Introducing PRIMET

PRIMET is a Trade Organisation formed by (mainly) SMEs within the EU that deliver high quality value-added meteorological products and services derived on sound scientific principles. PRIMET seeks to represent the interests of its members in the continued development of a vigorous, competitive and financially robust international market for these products and services.

In particular PRIMET:

• encourages and supports any activities likely to promote growth of the market;
• fosters commercial practices aimed at ensuring that all operators within the market, irrespective of their ownership, benefit from equal opportunities in the supply chain for meteorological and climate information, whether observational, analytical or predicted.

Membership of PRIMET is open, on payment of the appropriate membership fee, to any EU based organisation or individual operating within the private commercial sector which has the objective of delivering scientifically well founded, added-value products based upon meteorological or climate information, whether observational, analytical or predictive.

2. The Market

Meteorologists and oceanographers can process weather information to deliver knowledge about the future. This capability and knowledge is valuable to the whole of Society. It increases security and well-being, facilitates trade and industry and can be a crucial element in the fight to reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions at every level from the actions of individuals to the decisions of industrial giants and governments.
It is estimated for example, that:

• "Weather impacts $3.8 Trillion [per year] or approximately 1/3 of the U.S. economy" - Dean John Dutton, Penn State University (2002)
• "In the UK alone, there are around one dozen industries with capital and maintenance budgets of L100M -L1000M and which are impacted by the ability to predict accurately the occurrence of North Sea storm surges, an activity with an estimated benefit to (full) cost ratio of 5 or 10:1" (Ryder 1996)
• The relative position of the commercial meteorology market as between the USA and Europe was quoted by Weiss (1999) as:

	United States	Europe
Gross Receipts	$ 400-700 million	$30-50 million
Number of Employees	4000	300

From these figures we can estimate:

GEstimated annual tax return	$ 80 million	$ 7 million
Estimated income to government from data sales	$ 0	$ 0.5-1 million

It is reasonable to ask, given that the size of the US and EU economies are approximately the same, why the private sector weather business and the aggregate return to the government are about 10 times larger in the US?

3. The Issue

The answer to this question lies in the final row of the above table. In the USA the free availability of "taxpayer-funded government information - from corporate data from the Securities and Exchange Commission, to patent data from the Patent and Trademark office, to statistical and environmental data, etc. is contributing to the spectacular growth in the information retrieval and database industries" [of which the meteorological industry is a particular case]. And the US understands that there are "significant economic benefits to the nation from (an) open and unrestricted data policy" (Weiss 1999)

Whereas in the EU, "the concept of commercial companies being able to acquire, at very low cost, quantities of public sector information and resell it for a variety of unregulated purposes to make a profit, is one that policymakers find uncomfortable." (Weiss 1999).

This leads to strangulation of the EU commercial weather market and a significant loss to the EU economy in terms of jobs, and wealth. It also results in lost opportunities to deliver operational efficiencies in areas such as the energy consumption and carbon emission control, water management and other key elements of society's activities.

4. The Solution

PRIMET argues for a substantive change in charging policy for public service information within the EU. In line with the EU Directive 2003/98/EC publicly funded data should be regarded as a public good, available to all in a timely and relevant manner at the marginal cost of distribution. In the case of meteorology, the internationally agreed infrastructure necessary to identify, distribute and utilize these data, which is the subject of the Directive 2007/2/EC already exists. All current meteorological data, whether observations or analyses of the current state of the weather or predictive output from numerical forecasting models, is time limited. Its value for use in value adding services declines quickly on the scale of minutes to a few hours. Such data should therefore be made available over the internet with minimal time delay from its point of origination. If this were done, the meteorological (and oceanographic) services sector will grow as it has in the US with all of the concomitant benefits to the economy and society as a whole.

Such arguments can be applied to other sectors (mapping and other geophysical survey data, for example) with a consequent large multiple in the accrued benefit to the EU economy. In the EU model, centrally funded government owned agencies are required to "recover" some or all of their central funding by "selling" much of the raw or processed data essential for the production of these added value products and of which they are the monopoly national supplier. They are also mandated to sell the value added products in the retail market in competition with those who must rely upon the data. Since the responsibilities for achieving these "retail" sales lies with operating units embedded within the operational and accounting envelope of the agencies themselves, there is no clear, "arms length" commercial differentiation between the monopoly production and supply of the raw and processed data and the supply to the retail market of the value added services. Such an arrangement would not be tolerated in other sectors of the economy and one has only to look at the telecommunications and media industries to see that it has been vigorously and proactively prevented by government policy in these areas.

It is time that the provisions of EC Directive 2003/98/EC on the re-use of ublic sector information were uniformly and rigorously applied. This would relieve virtually all of the restraints to market growth and economic activity within the meteorological and climatological. It should be noted in this regard that the internationally agreed infrastructure for the identification, distribution, archiving and use of the data which is the subject of Directive 2007/2/EC already exists for meteorological and climatological data through the data protocols of the World Meteorological Organisation. This makes the sector an ideal test bed for the full implementation of these two Directives.