UK Met Office API
Weather forecasts from the United Kingdom's national weather and climate service UKMO
UK Met Office data is provided under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence. Therefore, any derived products from this data should also be redistributed under the same
or a compatible licence. Typically, Open-Meteo provides data under CC BY 4.0.
Data Sources
This API uses global UKMO Global 10 km weather forecasts and combines them with high-resolution UKV 2 km model for the United Kingdom and Ireland. Information about UKMO weather models is available here. For UKMO Global, values are interpolated from 3-hourly to 1-hourly after 54 hours and from 6-hourly data after 144 hours.
Note: UKMO open-data has an additional delay of 4 hours. The forecast is therefore not as accurate as it could be.
| Weather Model | Region | Spatial Resolution | Temporal Resolution | Forecast Length | Update frequency |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| UKMO Global | Global | 0.09° (~10 km) | Hourly, 3-hourly after 54 hours, 6-hourly after 144 hours | 7 days | Every 6 hours |
| UKMO UKV | UK and Ireland | 2 km | Hourly | 2 days | Every hour |
API Documentation
For a detailed list of all available weather variables please refer to the general Weather Forecast API. Only notable remarks are listed below
- Solar radiation:UKMO supplies shortwave radiation as instantaneous values. Open-Meteo transforms these into backward-averaged radiation to align with the definition used by other weather models. However, in the global domain, data shifts to 6-hour intervals, rendering instantaneous values useless at that temporal resolution. As a result, solar radiation forecasts are only offered for a 2-day forecast horizon, where 1-hourly data remains available.
- Direct Solar Radiation: UKMO provides direct solar radiation. Many other weather models only provide global solar radiation and direct solar radiation must be calculated user separation models.
- Wind, temperature and cloud forecasts on height levels 100m and above: Forecasts at different levels above ground are only available for the 2 km UKV model.
- Cloud Cover (2m): UKMO UKV 2 km provides cloud cover at 2 metre above ground which can be interpreted as fog. This is remarkable, because only very weather models are capable of modeling low level cloud cover and fog with a good degree of accuracy.