Weather as a weapon

Weather as a weapon creates opportunities to destabilize economies and governments. 2011 East Africa drought. Photo by Oxfam East Africa

As silent wars are fought by embargoes and computer viruses to disrupt economies and destabilize governments, collateral economic damage due to weather events has become a weapon of war. Governments are staring to implement bans on weather data export and requiring more and more that foreign weather services maintain weather data infrastructure within their borders.

In the future, detailed weather data will become sensitive information for many countries. This will pose a significant challenge to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in maintaining accurate climatology information, as raw meteorological data and their metadata may become a controlled commodity.