MIDAS Open version 202007 released More UK weather station data added

Last year the Met Office released the “MIDAS Open” dataset, a publically available version of the popular, but restricted, Met Office Integrated Data Archive System (MIDAS) Land and Marine Surface Stations dataset. Thanks to the efforts of the MIDAS Open team at the Met Office we’ve now published an updated version of MIDAS Open, bringing in new data for 2019 and updates for some existing years too. Though aimed at being of interest to everyone, we anticipate these new data will be particularly useful for service providers or members of the public who have previously been unable to use the restricted MIDAS dataset.

This release (version 202007) includes data from 2019 and amendments to the previous release (version 201908). To help users identify the changes, a series of ‘change logs’ have been produced for each dataset which include:

• An overall summary file for each dataset giving the number and lists of new, removed and updated files (example here)
• Details of each line where changes have occurred from the previous release (example here), providing full traceability of alterations made.

MIDAS Open comprises of hourly and daily weather measurements and observations of parameters relating to temperature, rainfall, sunshine, radiation, wind and weather observations such as present weather codes, cloud cover, snow etc. The data have been released under the UK’s Open Government Licence and formatted in spreadsheet-friendly BADC-CSV format. 

Though the MIDAS Open data are freely available for all users with a free CEDA user account, we would be delighted to hear more about your use of these data. Knowing about the types of work that these open data support helps us to gather evidence of the impact our data and services have. To tell us more please fill in our form here, it will take less than 10 minutes and will be a great help to us.

For more information about the MIDAS Open collection please see our earlier news item here.

Image: Met Office weather station site in the UK. (Courtesy of the Met Office)