UPDATE: NOAA/NCDC privacy concerns questioned by alert blog reader

In my previous post, NOAA Throws a roadblock my way I talked about how NOAA/NCDC has thrown a roadblock into the work being done to survey weather stations citing “privacy concerns” of observer’s name being included in station data being used to locate stations.

Alert blog reader Gerald Ingle passed this info on to me.

It appears that NOAA does not follow their own edicts, as they have a web page dedicated to cooperative observer newsletters and awards.

http://www.nws.noaa.gov/om/coop/2002-Awards.htm

On this web page you can find names of the observers, the station name, their PHOTOS in front of their stations, and in some cases their partial life history!

They also have a gallery of images in addition to the newsletters about COOP observers.

For example:

http://www.nws.noaa.gov/om/coop/2002/2002-15.htm

see caption below

Britt, IA, Cooperative Observers Dianne and Keith Hansons show

off their 10 Year Length of Service Award.

This blows the NOAA/NCDC “privacy concerns” out of the water. They were worried about names appearing with MMS station data, well here we have names, photos, and more on NOAA’s own website.

They can’t have it both ways. Here is the link for the NOAA newsletters page.

http://www.nws.noaa.gov/om/coop/coop_newsletter.htm

Note the link where ANYBODY can sign up their email and get the newsletter chock full of names, stations, and photos of observers

Get on the free newsletter mailing list

It’s not even a confirmation email signup, just type in anybody’s email and it appears to accept it.

No confirmation email was received when I signed up, so apparently having somebody getting spammed isn’t an issue either.

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David Walton
July 1, 2007 12:24 pm

This is getting entirely too depressing. Time for a Stooges break —
Stooges Break