I have looked at the weatherobs site - found it to be very very slow, it gave me an idea of temps in Cumbria from the main Met Office Sites but I could have used Wunderground and used the many more private stations to build up a picture of whats going on.

From a personal point of view I need access to

Carlisle, Spadeadam, Shap, Great Dun Fell, Bridgefoot, Keswick, Levens, Warcop and Walney

I have my own website so could use the Met Office data point service to drag the data into some readable format, but I dont know how to do it or where to start. If anyone has any code or wants to have a go on my behalf that would be great !!

For a while, I had forgotten all about Wunderground and I can remember that it was Arty who gives the daily updates on the CET threads, who first pointed me towards that site some time ago. That is meant for dealing with local personal weather stations such as what you have mentioned, and therefore doesn't give any data for the major Met Office stations such as Edinburgh Gogarbank. This has a downside to it because data from small individual weather stations is probably not likely to be accurate as the data for those major Met Office stations, although this data should be good enough to give a general picture of what is happening.

Although Wundergound doesn't give data for the major Met Office stations though, it is another place to get data for Edinburgh Airport although by default, it always reports temperatures in °F instead of °C, so I'm always having to change that in the settings for that site. If I was an actual member of that site though (which would only really be worthwhile if you had your station for which you wanted its data to be publicly available, you would probably be able to set that as a default in your account settings.

With all of this in mind, it's a good job tat there is sill the website of your own local station at Swanston in the south of Edinburgh. Although I live on the other side of Edinburgh from there, I have a really good view of the Pentland Hills from my south facing kitchen window and the Swanston website is quite good for telling us what the snow level is for the Pentland Hills if this lying snow doesn't extend down into that particular station itself. It's just a shame though, that there aren't more sites which are like that.

I have had a bit of a play with the weatherobs site and although it can be a bit slow, once you get the hang of using it I found the data easy and quick to access. It provides raw data in the same format as the weathercast site used to (go to the dashboard for each site) and does include the 99xxx stations. It goes back a full 7 days which is slightly further than weathercast which was about 6 days. No max or mins which is a shame as that is the missing piece when it comes to the 99xxx stations. But at least it does provide an acceptable alternative to the now defunct weathercast site.

One thing which I have discovered about weatherobs.com though is that just like a number of other sites, this doesn't actually show all of the available data in decoded form With the botanic gardens in Edinburgh for example (which is a 99xxx station, its WMO index is 99180 in this case), the minimum temperatures are shown every day at 6z in amongst the decoded data (you have to go to the extra decoded data tab to be able to see that). This decoded data doesn't show any maximum temperatures but if I look closely at the raw SYNOP data, I have noticed that this raw data does indeed, include the maximum temperatures every day at 18z.

As an example of that, I discovered from this data that yesterday's maximum temperature was 2.7°C which looks to be about right as yesterday's highest hourly reading was 2.6°C and the actual maximum temperatures are always the same as or higher than the highest hourly reading. There is also one other subtle difference in how rainfall is reported because unlike with the main 03xxx stations (such as Edinburgh Gogarbank), there is no separate entry in the raw SYNOP data for the 24 hour rainfall totals, As it turns out that, this doesn't actually matter since the rainfall totals can still be easily worked out by adding up the relevant 12 hour totals which are released twice a day at 06z and 18z.

Unlike with the main 03xxx stations though, the SYNOP data for the 99xxx stations doesn't actually include everything which has actually been recorded, and sunshine totals is one example of that. THat is why weatherobs.com has to be used in addition to the Met Office WOW site where I can get that other information (although there is often a delay with that being updated). When I do that though, I then still end up with all of the same data which I have been able to get for Edinburgh Gogarbank from a single source and this is all that I need.

However, it would be nice if we could get data from weatherobs.com for up to a time period like a week, but where we are able to choose any such period back to a certain date in the past instead of that always being just for the last week. If we were able to do that, I would then be able to catch up with all of the past data for the botanic gardens in Edinburgh in my various spreadsheets but without such a feature in place, this isn't something which I am able to do just now.

Thanks I will take a look at that further. At first glance it looked like the maximum and minimum figures I could see were just taken from the hourly data rather than actual maximums and minimums. Given the 03xxx stations are SYNOP stations then it would make sense that maximums are available at 18z and minimums at 06z.

To your last point about historic data this is now freely available for all Met Office stations from the CEDA website. The data currently goes up to July 2020 and includes data since each individual station was opened. This is an excellent resource and should I think give you what you are looking for. You have to register and get a login to access the data but this is quick and easy to do. The datalink page is here

http://data.ceda.ac.uk/badc/ukmo-midas-open/data/uk-daily-temperature-obs

.. and that is the big deal breaker for me in this case.

I have looked at the registration form for this and everything there seems to assume that you are studying for some form of degree (which I'm not) and asks questions such as where you are applying for such a degree and even who your supervisor is for that. This website says that you can access certain datasets without a login as long as this isn't being done through their FTP servers and yet as soon as I click on any links to even begin that process, I am asked to login before I can go any further, so that is obviously one big fat lie.

Furthermore, there is the question of privacy because even if I was actually studying for a degree, that is information which is private and confidential to me which means that I might not necessarily want to be giving out such information to ant third party organisation, even if the purpose of that is to get a login for a certain site, and even if this is a major company or organisation such as the Met Office.

That is why I will still continue to refuse to sign up for any sort of accounts which I need to login to, if all I am doing to trying to get access to data which I believe, should be freely available without the need for any registrations or logins. That is why I mentioned that it would be good if I could get a week's worth of data from weatherobs.com for any other period of time other than just the last week because even in this day and age, I strongly believe that it should be possible to do this (as it is with the 03xxx stations at sites such as meteomanz or ogimet) without any registration or login being required for that.

Weatherobs does show the max and min as taken from the 0600 and 1800 synop. You have to click on the station and then on the pop-up you click at the bottom where it says "Click to load dashboard for this site" (this doesn't show up on mobile for me, so use a desktop).

This then gives you three tabs: "Raw reports", "Decoded - Main" and "Decoded - Extra". The "Decoded - Extra" tab gives you the max and min at 12 hourly intervals in the table.

There are still some stations missing from this map, though. I wonder if there is a wider problem with availability? For example I found this site which looked perfect as it has an extensive list of dropdowns, but many of the sites only have data up to the end of January 2021, eg Braemar: Starlings Roost Weather (asuscomm.com)

What's interesting about weatherobs.com though, is that I am finding stations which I didn't know that even existed. As an example of that, it shows that there is a station to the north of the botanic gardens in Edinburgh. By looking more closely, this station has the name of SHIP AMOUK 36, and appears to be a ship which is currently moored at Leith Docks.

This isn't a major station and doesn't have a WMO number, but it does give out SYNOP codes every hour, although this is done in a slightly different way from the other stations which I know of because those are automated land stations where the SYNOP codes always start with AAXX, whereas this ship is obviously a marine station whose SYNOP codes always start with BBXX.

From that, I can get the temperature and pressure for each hour which in terms of the temperatures are often enough to show what it is like right on the coast itself, in comparison with locations which are just slightly further inland such as where I am.

I can now give an update on what is happening with SEPA as regards to getting rainfall data from there which will be very valuable for a lot of my fellow Scottish members of this forum who have used the SEPA site to obtain rainfall data for their local stations in the past.

First of all, I must add that certain things on that site have not changed. If you try to get the rainfall data from there in the old way, you will still get that same old Service Unavailable page. However, I have been informed on this forum that the nature of the recent cyber attack means that certain new systems might need to be developed and from what I can see, it looks as though this is what is going to happen as regards to being able to get any rainfall data.

If you go to the SEPA homepage and then click on the link which says "rainfall" under the section which says "water" (don't click on the link below that for rainfall data, as that will just take you the usual service unavailable page), you will be taken to another page which tells you all about what is happening as regards to the cyber attack and the current inability to get any rainfall data from there.

On the right-hand side of that page, you will see two different links which are listed under related items. The one which says "rainfall data" is just the old link which will once again, just take you to the service not available page. However, there is another link which says "Citizen Science Portal - Rainfall Observers" and that is where you want to go to as it looks as this is going to become the new way of getting rainfall data from SEPA in the (hopefully) not too distant future.

Just in case you have trouble getting to that section of the SEPA site, here is the direct link to it. It looks as though this site is going to operate in a similar manner to how wundergound operates for all types of weather observations. Anyone who has their own weather station (and I know that there are a number of people on this forum who do) will no doubt, also have their own way of recording rainfall and if your station is located somewhere in Scotland, you will be able to register there to enter your own rainfall data and have that available on-line.

However, SEPA was also previously good at giving me that important data for the major stations such as Edinburgh Gogarbank and the botanic gardens in Edinburgh, so I am hoping that this will continue to be the case under the new system once that is fully up and running. I haven't tested that part of it though, as I don't have my own weather station or rain gauge, but you are free to test that and come back to this thread on that matter if you so wish.

As for getting data from there, you won't need to register for that and so, it will just be a case of clicking on where it says "view data". As I write, there isn't actually any data available just yet and it may well be a while before there is. However, there is already a clickable map there and when that data does eventually become available,you will then be able to select the station from there, for where you are trying to get data for.

Given the nature of the recent cyber attack, this will obviously all have to be done with security in mind and so, I would probably expect this new system to be harder to hack or scrape than the old system, but it is nice to see that things are now happening on that front and I am now looking forward to seeing that new system fully up and running, whenever that eventually happens.

The reason why I started this particular thread is because back in 2021, we lost what was a very good site in weathercast.co.uk which led to quite a good discussion on here about the fact that it was becoming more difficult as a result, to get available data for stations such as Kew Gardens in London or the botanic gardens in Edinburgh which had (and still has) a WMO number which starts with 99 rather than 03.

Over the years, I have continued to be able to get such data from weatherobs.com but even that site only gives you nothing more than the last week's worth of data which is very difficult to scrape by using a python script (I was eventually able to overcome that, but that was a very difficult task to achieve).

However, I am seeing signs now that we are starting to turn the corner in regards to that data being harder to get because with recent developments, I am starting to find that this is no longer the case now to the same extent. That all started when I noticed just recently that the site at roostweather.com which has been previously mentioned by others on this thread, now gives us quite extensive data for stations such as Kew Gardens or the botanic gardens in Edinburgh. For the botanic gardens in Edinburgh, that data still only goes back to 2011 and since that particular station has been around since around 1956, you are still only getting a small fraction of all of the available data from there even with that. Nevertheless, even that is still a vast improvement on the 7 days worth of data which you get for there from weatherobs.com, and is therefore very clearly a big step in the right direction.

However, I have just discovered one other thing which I believe to be so important that I thought that it was enough for this thread to be revived as a result. When you go onto ogimet.com, you can do a search for a particular station if you know at least part of its name. I did that search entering EDINBURGH as the search term which gave me a list of stations here in Edinburgh. To my astonishment, I discovered that the botanic gardens in Edinburgh was actually on that list despite it not having a WMO number which began with 03. What I discovered though, is that every major station has what is known as WIGOS ID which consists of 4 different parts to it. The first and third part of that is always '0' with the second part of that being a number which identifies which country that particular station is in. For here in the UK, that number is always 826 and this means that the WIGOS-ID for all of the major SYNOP stations in the UK is always "0-826-0-" followed by a number which uniquely identifies the station itself.

For Edinburgh Gogarbank, the WIGOS-ID is "0-826-0-88" whilst the WIGOS-ID for the botanic gardens in Edinburgh is "0-826-89". As another example, the WIGOS-ID for Kew Gardens in London is "0-826-0-127". It turns out in fact that instead of entering the WMO Code when you are looking up data on ogimet.com, you can enter the WIGOS-ID. When I did that for Edinburgh Gogarbank, I still got exactly the same data as I get whenever I'm entering its WMO code of 03166. In addition to that though, I then entered the WIGOS ID for the botanic gardens and to my astonishment, I discovered that I was actually able to get the data for there as a result. There wasn't as much data for there as there was for Gogarbank but the important thing here nevertheless, is that there was some data there and that I'm no longer limited to just a week's worth of that data.

That to me is quite a big breakthrough because this shows that you can now get data for stations such as the botanic gardens in Edinburgh or Kew Gardens on ogimet.net just in the same way that I can for stations such as Gogarbank even if that station doesn't have a WMO code that starts with 03, as long as you can find its WIGOS-ID. I then tried that at meteomanz.com and couldn't actually get any data from there for the botanic gardens in Edinburgh, but the record for that particular does exist on meteomanz.com, so my guess is that I might only be a matter of time before we start to get some data on that site as well for those particular stations.

As for ogimet.com, I found that with the data for the botanic gardens in Edinburgh, I could also link back to the raw SYNOP/BUFR data for that in the same way that I could for Gogarbank and for both of those stations, it turns out that the raw SYNOP/BUFR data is actually very similar with the only difference being that for the SYNOP data, '00000' is shown instead of any WMO code with those positions where there isn't the equivalent data being taken up by a series of forward slashes. Nevertheless, that should still be easy enough to decode with my python scripts so with that, I am hoping that I will be able to make more use of that by reporting more data on here for the botanic gardens as a result, especially as it is my actual local station here in Edinburgh.