UK hourly site-specific observations tutorial

Basic tutorials showing how the UK observations data feeds can be used to retrieve data.

Please refer to the UK observations detailed documentation for the UK observations data feeds for more detailed information.

Introduction

The UK observations data feeds provide access to the hourly weather observations made over the 24 hour period preceding the time at which the web service was last updated. Observation data is only collected at some of the sites for which forecasts are provided. For a full list of these sites, see the site list data feed. The data provided by the web service are updated on an hourly basis, and at any given point in time the exact set of timesteps that are available can be obtained using the capabilities feed.

Tutorials

The UK observations data feed can be accessed via web services. Here we describe how to access data using each of these methods in the following three scenarios:

You would like a complete list of the observations for a specified location at each available timestep

  1. Call the UK observations site list web service to find the id of the location for which you would like an observation
  2. Call the UK observations capabilities web service to check whether the data has been updated since it was last requested
  3. If so, call the UK observations web service, specifying the id of the relevant location to retrieve the new data in either XML or JSON format

You would like a complete list of the observations for every location in the UK at a particular time

  1. Call the UK observations capabilities web service to check whether the data has been updated since it was last requested
  2. If so, call the UK observations web service, specifying the timestep to be retrieved, to retrieve the new data in either XML or JSON format

You would like a complete list of the observations for every location in the UK at each available timestep

  1. Call the UK observations capabilities web service to check whether the data has been updated since it was last requested
  2. If so, call the UK observations web service to retrieve the new data in either XML or JSON format

Example returns for sites with or without all parameters

Where all parameters are available the following is an an example of the XML that would be returned

<Rep D="ENE" P="1016" S="8" T="13.8" V="23000" W="7">780</Rep>

For sites that do not have all the parameters available, the following is an example of the XML that would be returned

<Rep D="N" S="3" T="11.5">0</Rep>

UK hourly site-specific observations