UK Station data sources

The Met Office was founded in 1854, and systematic collection and archiving of observations from official stations began soon afterwards. Official station observations are archived in the National Meteorological Library and Archive (NMLA) and described in their Guide to the data collections.

Some UK station observations are already digitised, and in the Met Office Integrated Data Archive System (MIDAS), but the records in MIDAS are limited and incomplete - only a subset of stations have any data for pre-1950, and those stations are almost all restricted to observations of daily maximum temperature, minimum temperature, wind, and rainfall.

The station records can be further divided according to the document series containing their archives. Some of these documents are paper only, others have been scanned and are accessible through the NMLA digital collections.

• Station Registers
• Climatological Returns
• Observatories - hourly reporting stations
• Second order stations - twice-daily reporting
• The Daily Weather Reports
• Derived data - longer-term averages