Download Met Office station data Help

PLEASE NOTE: The information provided below solely refers to the Met Office Land Surface data (1900-2000) dataset which has been superseded by the Met Office MIDAS dataset (1853-present) at the BADC.

The Download Met Office station data page allows you to download selected Met Office surface station data to your computer (please note this service is only available to registered users who have been granted access to the Met Office Land Surface data). It is intended for downloading data from multiple UK stations. If you want to download all the data for a single station then this can be more easily achieved using the Get Data file browser.

You select the files that you want to download by specifying the following information:

File type
Message type
Year. This can be entered as YYYY to select a single year, * to select all years, or YYY* to select a decade.
One or more UK regions. Multiple regions can be selected on a PC by using the Ctrl key or the Shift key to select a range.

Note that selecting many regions or years will result in long download times and may result in failure to download. You are advised to select as few regions and years as possible for each download.

The Action option allows you to either download the selected data or display information about the matching files. If you select Download then a list of all matching files will be constructed and displayed (this can take some time). When the page has finished loading you need to scroll to the bottom and press Continue to begin the download or Cancel to return you to the main form.

The files will be downloaded to your computer as a single gzipped tar file. This file can be unpacked by using WinZip on PCs, or the gzip and tar utilities on unix machines. Versions of gzip and tar (vmstar) are also available for openVMS machines.