Imagine having thousands of up-to-the-minute weather reports and warnings, radar maps and satellite photos available on your home computer -- without having to tie up a telephone line or pay a monthly fee.
The National Weather Service likes the idea, too, and has made )) the data available on a radio signal broadcast from Silver Spring. And scores of users in Maryland and Virginia, from emergency managers to radio and computer hobbyists, have hooked police scanners to their computers and tuned in.
In Prince George's County yesterday, officials in the office of emergency preparedness were logging storm warnings and using the data and graphics to gauge the storm's power as it entered West Virginia.
It was their first test of the system, called Wireless Weather Information (WWIN), in a big local storm.
"We'll be watching very closely the center of the low, and whether there are any variations in the storm track," said emergency director John K. Schroeder Jr. "If it should go out to sea farther north, we would get less snow. If it moves more easterly, then it picks up the Atlantic moisture sooner" and drops more snow.
"The big thing is that we are getting the information directly and we are able to manipulate the data ourselves," he said. "We consider it a fantastic tool."
The government wants to expand the test beyond the 60-mile range of the weather service transmitter. But companies that sell weather information for a profit want to pull the plug. They see it as a growing trend of government competition with the private weather industry.
"The marketplace is the best determiner of what the best way to disseminate information is," said Barry Lee Myers, executive vice president of Accu-Weather Inc., a commercial weather service in State College, Pa. "We need to be looking at how to run government more efficiently and cut costs, and not go into competition" with private industry.
Weather service officials argue that taxpayers paid to gather the data, and it should be disseminated as freely as possible.
"We're going to continue working on it," said Walter Telesetsky, director of systems operations at the weather service. "My aim is to get the data to emergency managers, and this certainly looks like one of the most promising things we've had in a long time."
WWIN's development was spurred partly by the deaths last spring of 20 people in a tornado-wrecked Alabama church. The area was outside the range of the federal Weather Radio system, which had broadcast voice warnings of the storms. Vice President Al Gore and government investigators challenged the weather service to expand the Weather Radio system and find new and better ways to warn people of approaching storms.
WWIN users can program their computers to interrupt other programs they may be using when weather alerts come in, or to flash room lights -- an aid to the deaf.
It also is intended to reach schools, with warnings and teaching tools. "The original goal was to provide weather data and science-type stuff to kids in inner city schools that don't have anything," said the weather service's special projects coordinator, Jim Doherty. WWIN was his brainchild. Given no budget, he built parts of it in his kitchen.
"These [schools] can't afford a dial line," he said. "They are going to be on the Information Dirt Road for quite a while."
Here's how WWIN works:
The weather service generates thousands of weather observations and forecasts, maps, satellite photos and warnings every day. The WWIN system funnels them into a high-speed desktop computer in Silver Spring. The computer data are then converted into an audio signal, amplified to 600 watts and transmitted at 163.350 MHz.
That's a frequency users within 60 miles of the transmitter can capture on a simple police scanner. The signal moves from the scanner's earphone jack to a small "demodulator" that converts it back to digital form and zips it into the user's computer.
The incoming data is organized and managed by colorful software developed by Maryland Radio Inc., of Laurel. Called "Weathernode," it is sold with the demodulator for $150. The weather service can provide a simpler program for free.
Running under Windows, Weathernode can handle 40,000 pages weather information per day. About 150 users have purchased the software from Maryland Radio, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency and 911 centers operated by Montgomery County and Alexandria, Va.
"It's pretty interesting to work with," said William Edward Lent III, chief of plans and programs at Prince George's County's office of emergency preparedness. "It gives us good notification, good read-outs."
Previously, the county's emergency planners relied on personal phone contacts with the weather service.
All that free data, however, irks some commercial weather vendors.
They serve mostly big business, but have small weather data systems they'd like to sell to local emergency managers, too. Carroll County pays $50 a month for a satellite-based system from Data Transmission Network, of Omaha, Neb.
While the weather service gives data away with programs such as WWIN, commercial vendors say they must buy their raw data from the weather service at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.
An alternative would be for the government to make the data free to vendors, too. "We're willing to compete on this basis," said Richard J. Reilley, who calls himself "vice president of ankle-biting" at Kavouras Inc., a Minneapolis weather data vendor.
Mr. Telesetsky, at the weather service, said there is no intent to compete with private industry. And the fees charged to the vendors cover the costs of providing the data, not the data itself.
WWIN is "just the tip of the iceberg," said Mr. Reilley. "Al Gore is going nuts on the information superhighway, and some of us are just becoming road kill."