Forecast it yourself

[sawyl]

Here's a somewhat unfortunate quote from a Free our Data piece in today's Guardian:

Making the Meteorological Office's observational data freely available for all might spawn a new culture of personal weather forecasting. It might even create an equivalent to the thriving market in ancestor-tracing information which has built up since the National Archives began making its data freely available.

Really? I suspect that this only seems plausible to people with a very limited knowledge of NWP and data assimilation. For if, as the article seems to suppose, generating a forecast is simply a case of having the right set of starting observations, why then do governments and organisations around the world spend quite so much on supercompting resources?

Or, to put it another way: if NWP was really that easy, wouldn't everyone be doing it already?