Bads news - I relied on the links quite alot for upto date data.

If you find any sources please let me know, thanks

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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.

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

 

 

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

 

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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.

 

 

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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 !!

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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?

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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 !!

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

 

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

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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 !!

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.

 

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What's happened to the airport data John? Do you know? I can't see it on Weatheronline

 

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.

 

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Thanks for that update johncs2016

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 !!

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Thanks for that update johncs2016

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.

 

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Thanks for all this John. I'd missed this thread somehow. I'll experiment with the links above.

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Thanks for all this John. I'd missed this thread somehow. I'll experiment with the links above.

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.

 

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Thanks for that update johncs2016

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 !!

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.

 

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.

 

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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

 

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.

 

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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.

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)

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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.

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