Official Met Office stations - climate and synoptic

[h2005__uk__]

I understand there are two types of Met Office/WMO official station - 'climate' and 'synoptic'. I believe Writtle, for example, is a climate one, while Andrewsfield is synoptic.

 

I read on the MetO site that the climate stations mostly report daily, but I've looked some up on the Weathercast site and they all appear to report hourly, such as here. The graph seems to just reproduce the hourly data, although upon closer inspection it looks like it may use more frequent data recordings.

 

How often do the climate and synoptic stations actually report? Are their reports widely available? I've also found this site here which shows the 'snyop' hourly data, along with max/mins, but seemingly for synoptic stations only. How do I view the max/mins for climate stations such as Writtle?

 

Thank you!

[TonyH]

Don't think that the max/ min daily data is available freely.

[cheese]

Climate stations like Writtle do not have freely available data to the public unfortunately.

[Jo Farrow]

SYNOPs are recorded every hour, so the observations are usually taken just before the hour so they are available on the hour (just about)

Alot of this data is now recorded automatically. You can see some of the data on the BBC weather website for each location, bottom right

e.g. Observed at 08:00, Tuesday 2 September, and a graphic

 

Climate data is sent to the Met Office and SEPA ( the environment agency  in Scotland, not sure about ENv.Agency in England adn Wales)

Volunteers help with this data, especailly the rainfall amounts

 

http://www.sepa.org.uk/water/river_levels/volunteer_rainfall_observing.aspx

 

Met office NCM National Climate message is 12 hourly and does include max /min on both. this kind of data is sold to newspapers etc

 

Click on NCM in this table http://badc.nerc.ac.uk/data/surface/met_domain.html

 

and it will eventually settle on the explaination of NCM climate data obs. Some regional data is available on Metoffice site WEATHER/Last 24 hours

You have to wait for the NCM to get the actual Max, as it could have been at 15:36 and not recorded in the hourly ob. Also sometimes observations aren't collected until end of the week or month, which has caused issues on 'hottest day of the year' times.

 

Doesn't give you an answer to how to get the data but hope it explains what it out there.