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What a horrific article. Complete nonsense. Meteorology is not an exact science but great strides have been made with increasing forecast accuracy. One of the problems is that the National Weather Service covers very broad areas. Even the local offices have a lot of responsibility and a lot of ground to cover. I'd like to see anyone forecast with PINPOINT accuracy where summertime air-mass thunderstorms are going to develop. Private companies have the luxury of forecasting for a specific time/place and since they are paid to do so, they can invest time/effort into that. NWS simply cannot.

Unfortunately, these aren’t the only problems with the National Weather Service. The service has been accused in the past of withholding government aircraft reconnaissance of hurricanes for up to 11 hours before releasing the information to private companies or the public.

Since when is the government required to release such info to a private company?

I'm reminded of the following paragraph that discussed the difficulties with forecasting the weather:

Imagine a rotating sphere that is 12,800 kilometers (8000 miles) in diameter, has a bumpy surface, is surrounded by a 40-kilometer-deep mixture of different gases whose concentrations vary both spatially and over time, and is heated, along with its surrounding gases, by a nuclear reactor 150 million kilometers (93 million miles) away. Imagine also that this sphere is revolving around the nuclear reactor and that some locations are heated more during one part of the revolution and other locations are heated during another part of the revolution. And imagine that this mixture of gases continually receives inputs from the surface below, generally calmly but sometimes through violent and highly localized injections. Then, imagine that after watching the gaseous mixture, you are expected to predict its state at one location on the sphere one, two, or more days into the future. This is essentially the task encountered day by day by a weather forecaster.

The service has been accused in the past of withholding government aircraft reconnaissance of hurricanes for up to 11 hours before releasing the information to private companies or the public.

They haven't done it in the past several years--if they ever did it at all. Recon data are virtually real-time these days.

I want to know who we should believe when Accuweather reports a storm will strike both Houston and New York, and TWC reports the same storm will strike Miami and New Orleans.