Of course, I fully understand that SEPA need to take as much time as they need to in order to sort this issue out properly.

However, it's just such a shame that this has happened as they have been been very good at providing the rainfall data not just for the major stations such as Edinburgh Gogarbank and the botanic Gardens in Edinburgh, but also for a number of local stations in Edinburgh such as Colinton and Murrayburn.

However, I'm sure that SEPA will come back even bigger and better when they do get everything sorted out.

Meteociel:

http://www.meteociel.com/modeles/gfse_cartes.php?runpara=1 

Wetterzentrale:

https://www.wetterzentrale.de/en/topkarten.php?map=1&model=gfs&var=1&time=6&run=6&lid=PARA&h=0&tr=6&mv=0 

Weathercast used to have a really good rainfall radar images, with zooming facilities, plus lightning animations of certain European countries (Netherlands, Germany). However, this stopped at some point in 2016, & hasn't been so good since (at least not what I noticed on my browsers). 

I will add though that there are certain parts of the weathercast site which requires the now deprecated and obsolete Flash plug in and so, it probably badly needs to be redesigned and brought up to more modern standards in any case.

You probably have these bookmarked, but just in case.

Decoded synop reports (ogimet.com)

Temperature, Table: UK/Europe : Current weather (weatheronline.co.uk)

For those of a technical mind, it looks like Weathercast now serves up a 301 redirect to WeatherPro - and that's server side, so can't be avoided.

A shame, as their ECM ensemble graphs were pretty decent.

You can still get to the ensemble charts via Meteociel, which links to Meteo24 and gives the same location options.

http://www.meteo24.fr/fr/home/meteo-france-et-europe/passion-meteo/ensemble-de-previsions.html?eps=london

Incidentally, I have just gone to their weather station data from the above link and although that only really covers France, I have been able to get the same data from there for my three local stations here in Edinburgh as what I was previously able to get at weathercast, just by replacing the numeric part of the resulting URL with the WMO number of the station in question.

That is therefore, another option which is available and it might well be a good idea to keep a few f these links as a backup just in case anything goes wrong with one of them. However, it is weird that these European sites are working well whereas wethercast (which is actually just the UK version of these other sites) isn't.

Of coursr, I don't want to get political in any way, but I'm wondering if this is somebody trying to get their own back on us after Brexit.

For the French site, you go to 'http://www.meteo24.fr/fr/home/meteo-france-et-europe/temps-dans-le-monde/stations-meteo/obsid/[WMO].html' replacing '[WMO]' with the WMO number for your station and for the Belgian site, you go to 'http://www.meteoservices.be/be/home/weer/weer-wereldwijd/waarnemingen/obsid/[WMO].html'', again replacing '[WMO]' with the WMO number your station.

As an example, the WMO number for Edinburgh Gogarbank is 3166 which means that for the Belgian site, I just need to go to http://www.meteoservices.be/be/home/weer/weer-wereldwijd/waarnemingen/obsid/3166.html and for the French site, I would go to http://www.meteo24.fr/fr/home/meteo-france-et-europe/temps-dans-le-monde/stations-meteo/obsid/3166.html to get the same data for Edinburgh Gogarbank in both cases.

You then just need to replace that number 3166 with the WMO number for your own local station in both cases.

I hope that this helps.

Hanlon's razor.

Or, in other words, it's far more likely that some management type decided the websites are all old fashioned and they're moving them to the newer trendy, dumbed-down type.

Make the most of the French and Dutch sites would be my advice, as almost certainly they'll be moved over too in due course.

It will be a very sad day if and when that happens as this data has always been very valuable to a lot of people and it would be a real shame to lose that.

Having said that, no part of any site should be requiring the use of the old and outdated Flash Plugin these days and so, I can see why these sites need to be redesigned and brought properly up to date.

Let's just hope that when they do that, we will still end up having some way of being able to access that data, even if this has to be done in a different manner.

I can no longer access the French and Dutch sites today to view my local stations data.

Probably taken down because they can't get the vaccine !

I can now inform everyone that as from this morning, both of the French and Belgian weathercast clones have now gone, and are redirecting to weatherpro.com in that respective country.

This means that unless anyone can come up any of these sites from a different country which may well still be working, it is now no longer  possible to access that data in any way.

This also means that I am now, not able to post the latest update on the PW thread which I was about to give, as I no longer have any way of getting any live rainfall data for each hour as it happens as I was before.

I could of course resort to using the SYNOPS data from weatherobs.com, meteomanz.com or ogimet.com but I'm not sure that this fits in very well with the 09:00 UTC to 09:00 UTC time frame which is normally used for reporting each day's rainfall data and which I had rec ently been adapting to.

EDIT

There is also weatheronline.co.uk, but that only goes up to end of the previous day (not sure if that is based on 90:00 UTC to 09:00 UTC or not) and doesn't give me the live rainfall data which I was previously able to get from weathercast and from SEPA.

If you find any sources please let me know, thanks

Nor sure I follow the comment above in bold. Weatheronline is an excellent resource for hourly temperatures to the nearest tenth of a degree (the Met Office site only provides live data to the nearest degree). You can access data for previous days very easily by clicking on the calendar. For example this link shows temperatures sorted by warmest to coldest for 12GMT on 1 Jan 2020.

https://www.weatheronline.co.uk/weather/maps/current?LANG=en&UP=1&R=310&TYP=temperatursyn&ART=tabelle&LANG=en&DATE=1609502400&KEY=UK&LAND=UK&CONT=ukuk&SORT=3&SI=mph&CEL=C&UD=0

The same data is available on OGIMET but it doesn't have such a nice listing option for all stations - it only gives the top 10 by warmest, coldest etc.

The data being used at both these sites consists of the 147 or so SYNOP stations which report every hour as per the list at this link:

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/binaries/content/assets/metofficegovuk/pdf/data/uk_synop_station_list.pdf

In addition the Weatheronline list includes METAR stations (i.e. airport sites) which are not official Met Office stations. Hence why the link above contains a total of 174 stations.

What was really good about the Weathercast site was that in addition to the SYNOP stations in WMO number format, it also provided data for a second list of UK SYNOP stations which are called CDL (climate data logger) stations. These sites all have a 5 digit number beginning with 99 as per this list

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/binaries/content/assets/metofficegovuk/pdf/data/uk_synop_station_list_-_cdl_%28climate_data_logger%29_numbered_stations.pdf

There is a way to get access to some of this CDL data realtime. You can use the Met Office Datapoint service. This is freely available if you register. It is a bit of a faff and not nearly as easy to use as the Weathercast site. The data is provided in XML or JSON format. It is fairly easy to decipher once you know what you are doing (I use the JSON format). It is meant for developers hence why it is not ideal for day to day viewing by the general public.

The other limitations of the Datapoint service are that you can only get hourly observational data for the past 24 hours and it only covers a small number of the CDL stations. So for example two of the CET stations are CDL stations. The data for Stonyhurst is available on Met Office Datapoint but the data for Pershore College is not. No idea why it only covers some of the CDL stations. Unfortunately I don't know of any other source at present where CDL data is publicly available.

If you want to explore the Datapoint service you can do so by starting at this link:

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/services/data/datapoint/about

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.

Thanks for the updates, I had contacted the Met Office myself and asked them how I could get the data and the reply was as above the datapoint service, sadly for me I dont have the know how to get the data. I have some limited knowledge of html but I dont think its going to help. We need some clever person that can build a small webpage where we can input our chosen Met sites and obtain the data we need !! and of course all for free.

Anybody up for a challenge !!

What’s annoying for me is that weathercast had weather data for non-automatic stations. They’re very difficult to find otherwise. For example I liked checking out Bramham weather station but now I can’t do that. 

Accessing weather data in this country is so unnecessarily difficult. Why can’t we just have it all in one place like NOAA?

I had a look at Datapoint yesterday

You only need to fill in a one page registration form to get a login and API key and have a quick look at the documentation to see how to get the info in xml or json format (which is readable as text but not prettily fomatted)

However, only 140 out of the 6000 stations in datapoint are available this way

If you look at

http://www.met.reading.ac.uk/~brugge/CURR.html

This is the same list (apart from 4 99XXX stations) that you can get from Datapoint

Personally I think the option John mentioned above using weatherobs.com is a better bet and has many more stations available

Actually weatherobs has the Bramham station so that’s good! Still wish we could see daily highs and lows for these stations though.

If Brian has read this thread, I am wondering whether or not he could possibly come up with some way of incorporating that into the data section of the official TWO website, along with the increasing amounts of forecast data which we have been able to see there, but possibly under a different subsection of that to show that we are dealing with past data rather than forecast data.

Furthermore, Gavin P. has managed to incorporate all of the past CET data into his GavsWeatherVids website, so he might be able to look into this as well at a less busy time.

I have looked into has happened with weatheronline, but have decided that this thread is a far more appropriate place to give my response to that, rather than the CC thread which is just meant to be for reporting this data as regards to the latest weather observations.

Having looked into that, I have discovered that this data is still there, but you now need to be a paid member of that website in order to be able to see the past data for there, or any other station.

That is probably not worthwhile if you can get that same data for free from other sites such as ogimet or Meteomanz, and that is why I think that a site such as timeanddate is quite good for getting data for Edinburgh Airport.

With that site, you can sign up for a membership which then enables you to set Edinburgh Airport as the default location for any weather data. However, such a membership is completely free (although other privacy concerns in terms of you passing on data about yourself to other organisations could still put you off from wanting to do that if you are that way inclined.

If you just casually want to find the weather for Edinburgh Airport at any time though, you don't have to be a member of that website for that.