NPR.

N-R.

Adrian Ma, what is an app on your phone that you use every single day?

Like besides the text messaging app?

Yeah, or like Candy Crush or whatever. Um, I would have to say the weather app. It's like the first thing that I open in the morning. Me too. Now, here's another question. Do you ever think about where the weather forecast on your phone comes from? You know, until very, very recently, I had not thought about this at all.

I just assumed, like, somebody was beaming it to me from a satellite somewhere.

Yeah, I never really thought about this either until I started using a specific weather app on my phone.

The app lets me toggle between almost a dozen forecasting sources.

And confession, sometimes if I'm hoping for a particular forecast,

I'll just shop around in the app until I get the forecast that I want.

You're like, oh, it's going to rain today.

Or is it?

Or is it?

I guess this just goes to show how much access we have to weather information these days.

Weather forecasting has gotten a lot more accurate in the last few decades.

It's a multi-billion dollar industry.

Companies from tech startups to huge corporations are competing to produce more sophisticated

and precise forecasts.

This kind of scientific arms race is bringing to the four long-simmering tensions in the

meteorology community. The tension is over how weather data should flow between the government

and private companies and at what price. This is the indicator from Planet Money. I'm Whalen Wong. And I'm

Adrienne Ma. Today on the show, how much is an accurate weather forecast worth? Who should

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