Project
Met Office's MetDB system
Abstract
Since the early days of this century the Met Office has been responsible for maintaining the public memory of the weather. All meteorological observations made in the UK and over neighbouring sea areas have been carefully recorded and placed in an archive where they may be accessed today by those with an interest in the weather and where they will also be available to those in future generations. The MetDB database holds data including surface and upper air observations and some satellite data. These data are from a number of different message types covering data from land and ship surface data measurements through to upper air observations from wind profilers, radiosonde ascents and aircraft measurements and also satellite measurements. Data stored by the BADC in the MetDB database extends back to 2009.
Details
| Keywords: | Met Office, MetDB, meteorology |
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| Previously used record identifiers: |
http://badc.nerc.ac.uk/view/badc.nerc.ac.uk__ATOM__ACTIVITY_405feaac-e163-11e1-9e26-00163e251233
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More Information (under review)
The BADC holds a subset of the MetDB dataset. This subset contains around 9 message types - land and ship SYNOP messages, metars reports, amdars, TEMP and PILOT messages, RASS and windprofiler, ozone sat and ozone profiler and climat reports. Most messages are updated upto 4 times daily and BADC release the data around about 3 days in arrears.
Surface observations over the UK meet many different requirements in such areas as forecasting, civil aviation, defence, commerce, industry, agriculture and research. Stations are organised into networks which are designed to meet particular user requirements. Data stored in the MetDB database has been collected by multiple station networks, the differing factor being the type of message in which they transmit their data.
Observation station use specialised apparatus to measure certain parameters, then transmit the results in a type of message (i.e. a SYNOP message), which may then be picked up by the Met Office, decoded, and later stored in the MetDB archive in the BADC.
In the MetDB dataset there are, in general, measurements of:
If you have queries about these pages or about obtaining the Met Office surface stations data from the BADC then you should contact CEDA Support. Your query should be answered within one working day. When follow-up work is required, the CEDA support will carry out the work as quickly and efficiently as possible, and in any case, the user will be kept informed of progress.