China Issues New Policy on Public Meteorological Data Governance and AI Integration
The China Meteorological Administration has officially released the "Meteorological Data Management Measures," which will take effect on November 1. The regulation establishes a formal legal framework for defining public meteorological data rights, authorizing operational use, and enabling cross-sphere earth system data sharing. This regulatory framework fills long-standing policy gaps regarding the monetization and property rights of public weather data. It aims to accelerate the development of high-quality meteorological datasets to power artificial intelligence and big data applications across various industrial sectors safely. The policy applies China's "structural separation of data property rights" model to meteorology, setting clear lines of security responsibility across data handling stages. It also establishes oversight platforms, categorizes important data catalogs, and mandates safety assessments for cross-border data transfers.
## BACKGROUND
China has positioned data as a fundamental factor of production alongside land, labor, capital, and technology. Under national data infrastructure policies, the framework of "structural separation of data property rights" separates data rights into resource holding rights, processing and usage rights, and product operation rights. This mechanism allows public institutions to authorize commercial utilization of data assets while maintaining strict security controls.