Tom, Thanks for opening up such a forum... From what I can gather, not that many people outside of the meteorological profession care all that much about these concerns. I will send you a copy of a letter I submitted to Shoptalk last September, along with another meteorologist's direct reply:

---

It seems to me that a lot of radio and television stations are trying to wrongly take credit for a weather forecast. Several stations try to get around hiring credentialed meteorologists. Many of these stations appear to be in serious violation of plagiarism and copyright laws.

The most popular forms of this kind of violations are copying the forecasts from the National Weather Service, the Weather Channel, or even from a competing station. A closer look at plagiarism laws will demonstrate that tweaking the numbers or changing the wording of someone else's forecast doesn't insulate you from liability.

If a station does not have the budget or the desire to hire someone who has the credentials to provide a forecast, the station should have two options:

1) Use the National Weather Service's forecast, giving proper credit.
2) Don't do weather at all.

Jason Cali
Ithaca, NY