I registered for this and accessed the site list and hourly data using the xml feed and my API key - not too difficult if you scan the documentation
Although the site list contains 6,000 stations only about 140 of them are available for free downloading of hourly data as you describe
Basically all the sites with WMO refs 3000-3999 plus just 4 others in the 99xxx range (Woburn, Scarborough, Stonyhurst, North Wyke)
Digging around a bit, I think the data exists on an hourly basis for many of the other sites but the Met Office have decided to make this only available at a fee (£500-£2000pa per "bulletin") which is a great shame IMHO
So my conclusion is that for smaller sites like Kew Gardens, Brampton and some of the Edinburgh ones there is no longer any public access to this hourly data anywhere
Unless anyones knows differently
Out of my three local stations here in Edinburgh, the botanic gardens in Edinburgh is the odd one out as the only one which is a CDL station (i.e. with a 5 digit WMO code beginning with 99).
As has been mentions those official WMO stations whose WMO indices begin with 03 (for meteomanz, you have to enter the WMO index as 03166 for Edinburgh Gogarbank for example, and not just 3166 as the have to be exactly 5 digits in length)) are easy to find data for and by using the data from Meteomanz, I have been able to decode the raw SYNOP data into a spreadsheet and get the same data and more as a result, which I was able to get from weathercast.
This means that I am able to get the same hourly updates for the sunshine totals as before and even other data such as the grass minimum temperatures, even though none of that data is available in a decoded format, so you have to know how to manually decode the raw SYNOP data in order to be able to retrieve that data which of course, is no use to the average user who isn't going to have that knowledge.
As for the CDL stations, the best place which I have been able to go to, to get data for those sites is weatherobs.com which gives the hourly data for the last week, including the raw undecoded SYNOP data for that period. However, that is a site which is very hard to scrape as the structure of these parts of this site which contain this actual data are hidden behind a lot of server side code and javascript which is even setup to prevent you being able to copy and paste anything from there.
This means that your only means of being able to grab that data is to manually type it in somewhere else which is a very tedious process that is prone to a lot of human errors.
Edited by user
01 February 2021 15:04:56
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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.