US Defense Department will stop providing satellite weather data

Are there other countries with similar weather satellites? I imagine China or the EU likely have some of their own. I know the US has been pushing this for free so plenty of nations likely piggy back off the free data. But I imagine larger ones might want their own redundant services to some degree to avoid vulnerability.

If so, they might be benefiting, but that’s about it.

"Since its establishment in 2014, the Copernicus program has received consistent investment from ESA, making it the world’s largest and most advanced open data Earth Observation initiative for climate, disaster, and resource management."[0]

Data from the Copernicus program is available for any citizen or organization worldwide. So a lot of free data will still be accessible.

[0] https://newsletter.terrawatchspace.com/global-earth-observat...

Definitely. The EU has weather satellites and Asia as well. Luckily, they tend to collect data around the entire world but what we lose here is the on-the-ground infrastructure that is woven together with satellite data to give better information about the facts on the ground.

Funny enough, this came up in the Netherlands a few months ago. The government released their own mobile app based on the data they collect and the private weather apps got all upset that the government was competing. What made it hilarious though, is that the private companies are all using the open source government data to power their apps!

So yea, this data will still be collected in the USA, but then sold to for-profit companies for basically nothing and then they will charge consumers for access to data collected with their collective tax dollars. Pretty messed up imo.