First of all, I would like to know if anyone knows what has happened to weathercast.co.uk which up until now, has been a very important place for me to get the various pieces of data for three different stations here in Edinburgh (Edinburgh Airport, Edinburgh Gogarbank and the botanic gardens in Edinburgh), which I use to build up the information which I then post to various threads such as the daily CC threads, the monthly PW threads and the various statistics threads which I always start for each month, season or year at the appropriate times.
I know that this isn't something which just affects me because I have seen various posts on other threads such as the monthly CET threads which contain links that point to some sort of data from weathercast. Up until the early hours of this morning, everything was still working fine with that but unfortunately, I am now finding that whenever I try to access that data for any of my three local stations, I just get redirected to another site at weatherpro.com. This means that I no longer have any access to this very important data. It seems as though Meteogroup (which owns that site) have decided to get rid of weathercast altogether but what is even more weird is that when you try to go to Meteogroup's home page, you then get redirected to another site at dtn.com.
Has Meteogroup been bought out by another company? That is important as well because it is Meteogroup who the BBC get most of their weather data from and so, I'm not sure what impact these changes will have on that. It is clear though, that something fishy is going on here and it would be nice to be able to get to the bottom of that.
In addition to that, the rainfall totals section of SEPA's website has been out of action since they had their big cyber attack just before Christmas and when you try to go there now, you just get a message saying that the service is temporarily unavailable. For the last few years, I have relied on weathercast and SEPA for the most up to date rainfall data for Edinburgh Gogarbank and the botanic gardens in Edinburgh with one of those sites acting as a backup just in case the other one goes down. Now that we have lost access to the data for both of those sites, I now no longer have any means of getting any up to date rainfall data for those two stations (I could go to somewhere like wunderground, but that only really gives the data for individual PWSs which are not going to be as reliable as the more official stations which are managed by the Met Office (Edinburgh Airport is covered at Wunderground, but no rainfall data ever comes from there these days).
In the meantime, I can get enough info from the latest SYNOP data at sites such as Meteomanz and weatherobs for reporting other.components of the weather such as the temperatures and even the sunshine totals. There is also the Met Office's WOW site from which I am able to get the sunshine totals for the botanic gardens in Edinburgh. However, that is quite often well out of date and in any case, that site doesn't give us all of the data for these stations which I like to report. It doesn't for example, give us the sunshine totals for Edinburgh Gogarbank.
I must add now that without any access to this important data, I cannot continue to make the contributions to this forum which I have been able to make in terms of reporting the actual data for what is happening here in Edinburgh. I know that there is a lnumber of people on this forum who own and run their own weather stations. However, not everyone is able to do that for those of us who can't, access to this sort of data is a massive god-send for those of us who have an avid interest in the weather and who just want to be able to report what is happening in their area in the best way possible. Indeed, even those who do own and run their own weather stations will still want to check the official data for other nearby Met Office managed sites in order to ensure that their own stations are working as accurately as possible so when that data just suddenly isn't available any more, this can be very frustrating for quite a lot of people.
For that reason, I would like to put this out to the other members of this forum, just to see if anyone rlse has found themselves in this position.
Edited by user
28 January 2021 10:53:49
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Reason: Not specified
The north of Edinburgh, usually always missing out on snow events which occur not just within the rest of Scotland or the UK, but also within the rest of Edinburgh.