Weather Data in CEDA Archives

Users frequently contact the CEDA helpdesk asking about the availability of meteorological data for a given location. This article will hopefully direct most people to relevant data that we hold and a few hints and tips along the way. However, if you still can't find the data that you need, please free to get in touch and we'll do what we can to assist.

Surface Meteorology

• Met Office  MIDAS - is one of CEDA's most popular datasets containing historical meteorological observations back from the present to the 18th century. We have a number of tools and guides to making use of these data, including our MIDAS Quick Start Guide - see the related articles section below.
• Met Office MIDAS Open - this is a subset of the UK stations from MIDAS that have been made available under the UK Open Government licence, so available for all types of use.
• Met Office  MetDB - holds data from a limited number of meteorological message types, but reaches CEDA archives within 48 hours of observation. These include surface meteorology in land and sea SYNOP messages, METARS messages and upper air TEMP, PILOT and AMDARs messages. 
• Met Office HadUK-Grid - provides gridded surface data derived from a range of observations inputs, including the data from MIDAS.

Other sites that may have other data sources, including data from amature observers, include:

COL/Met Office Weather Observers Website (WOW)/Weather Underground

Upper Air data

• Balloon-borne radiosonde measurements of temperature, humidity, wind speed and direction. CEDA has a number of data collections with these data such as:
  • Met Office high resolution radiosonde data,
  • MetDB collection holds TEMP messages generated by radiosonde stations from sites around the world
• Weather Radar data held by CEDA comes in a variety of types, including:
  • wind profiling radar - MST radar near Aberystwyth, Chilbolton Observatory in Hampshire  Met Office Wind profiler collection
  • Rain radar products from the Met Office's NIMROD system include composite rain fall from the UK and Europe as well as single and dual polar products from individual sites.
• LIDAR data held by CEDA include backscartter data from the Met Office;s LIDARNET collection
• Airborne observations are available as part of the FAAM and EUFAR