To know what the weather will be in one place at many future times, you first need to know what it is at one moment in many places. That only became possible once messages could travel instantly over long distances. Before that, maps showed where places were but not what was happening in all of them at once.
A very detailed prediction is worthless if working it out takes longer than the weather takes to arrive. The early equations for forecasting were correct but went unused because nobody could solve them fast enough or feed them enough measurements. One early dreamer pictured a stadium of 64,000 people doing sums by hand to keep pace.
The atmosphere ignores borders, so no country can forecast its own weather using only its own measurements. Weather scientists treated the atmosphere as one continuous common good from the start and learned early to swap data freely across nations. This makes forecasting a diplomatic achievement as much as a scientific one.
As extreme weather makes forecasts more valuable, the free international exchange of weather data comes under more pressure, not less. Private companies may come to replace a system built on countries cooperating. The more something shared is worth, the more tempting it becomes to own it.
Things that seem weightless, like a forecast, rest on a huge physical network of stations, satellites, cables and computers built up piece by piece over many years with no single author. Because nobody clearly made it and it works quietly every day, people take it for granted. They treat a world-spanning achievement as a tool for picking shoes.