Get the Data
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Historical weather data is useful for looking at trends in weather and for looking for weather influences on other events, for example to try to identify the cause for an episode of acidic water in Bristol rivers. |
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One source is the Met Office historical climate data which provides monthly records of min and max temperature, rainfall and sunshine hours over varying periods of time for a number of stations - over 150 years for Oxford. However the data is provided only in a text format. e.g. Cardiff To make this more accessible, I wrote a couple of scripts to reformat this data as XML:
It would be better to use an established vocabulary for the measurements but I don't know of one. |
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There is an archive of METAR reports - half-hour weather reports from Airports - The earliest records date from 2008-11-06. METAR is a complex text code so it is useful to have an API which returns decoded weather reports. A prototype which decodes wind direction and speed, temperature and pressure and a bit more is here: http://184.73.216.20/exist/rest/db/apps/weather/metarhistory.xq hatmandu's wunderground.com source has much better coverage - for EGGD back to 1997
(20 Jan '11, 07:46)
kitwallace
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www.wunderland.com has free data feeds for airport stations too (and some private weather stations). A plain text feed is available, eg: http://www.wunderground.com/history/airport/EGHD/2009/1/5/DailyHistory.html?format=1 (where 'EGHD' is the station code). 1
Thanks, this is an excellent source. The request is for a single day and returns data converted to imperial units in a text file. This script returns multiple days in XML, JSON (CORS enabled) and HTML with data in metric units: http://184.73.216.20/exist/rest/db/apps/weather/wumetarhistory.xq
(19 Jan '11, 18:36)
kitwallace
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Am I right in thinking METAR does not have rainfall data? I ran a query for Brize Norton yesterday (it definitely rained!) but there's no rainfall data: Brize Norton using the API linked to in the post above 1
METAR has qualitative precipitation data coded in weather conditions - for example the code -RADZ means light rain drizzle - - these quite a few RA codes in the Brize Norton sample. I need this data for my historical analysis so I'm working on extended the decode.
(18 Jan '11, 10:44)
kitwallace
acotgreave: good question but probably better as a comment on kitwallace's original response rather than a new response ...
(19 Jan '11, 08:50)
rgrp ♦♦
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The Air Quality Unit at Bristol City Council keeps some meteorological and air quality data which is available online: http://www.bristol.airqualitydata.com/cgi-bin/reporting.cgi Hourly readings of Air Temp, Humidity,Solar Radiation and Rainfall from one station and NO, NOx, NO2, O3 from other stations are available via an emailed response in CSV. Met data from about Jan 2006. |
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The Citizen Weather Observer Program collects weather data from citizens and makes it available to the public. In the UK, Philip Gladstone provides a detailed and analytic interface to data from amateur and profession sources such as METAR stations see for example his page on Bristol Airport |
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I've been very impressed by Wolfram|Alpha's response to weather queries. Seems to be based on METAR data. For example I was looking for wind data for Seville and whilst I can extract it using the application above, the query
Seville 2010 wind returns a nice graph. Not open data and I cant find an API either. |
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Thanks, this is an excellent source. The request returns data converted to imperial units in a text file. Byregards CW |
