摘要：
Weather forecast information provided by the National Meteorological and Hydrological Services (NMHSs) have significantly increasing impacts on individuals’ daily decision making and therefore directly or indirectly creating benefits for people’s daily life. The value of weather information not only comes from accurate forecasting, but also depends on whether people can properly perceive and use the information to enhance safety and convenience in their daily life. To reveals the application and the importance of the weather information, this study sponsored by the Central Weather Bureau (CWB) in Taiwan has conducted more than 120,000 telephone surveys for individual households, including 6,416 surveys in six major municipalities and 6,013 surveys in the other 16 counties/cities in Taiwan in 2020 and 2021, respectively. A contingent valuation method (CVM) is utilized to evaluate the socioeconomic value of weather information. The results show that about 60% of the respondents obtain weather information through TV stations despite that younger people are more likely to obtain weather information through mobile phone APPs. Overall, the respondents agree that the weather information is helpful, and they are satisfied with the information provided by CWB. However, the respondents in the 6 major municipalities and their counterparts in counties/cities have different needs and willingness-to-pay (WTP) values for weather information due to different living environments or socioeconomic backgrounds. By estimating the WTP bid function, it is found that the respondent’s subjective rating of weather information has significant impacts on their WTP values. Finally, we have found that the average monthly WTP for the households in the 6 major municipalities is 36.66 NTD, and 33.22 in the other 16 counties/cities. The estimates of annual aggregate economic values are $2.05-2.97 billion NTD for the households in the 6 major municipalities and $0.81-1.08 billion NTD for the households in the other 16 counties/cities.
