Localised Weather Forecasts · Technical documentation

meteoblue Weather Forecast for Weather Stations

Situation analysis

meteoblue operates high resolution weather models and combines them with various third party weather models to reach the highest precision level. Therefore, more than 25 different models are used and compared against many thousand weather stations every hour. This whole process is completely automated, which allows meteoblue to offer highest precision forecast at very attractive prices.

The cooperation with providers of automated weather stations has multiple advantages for both sides:

Top precision weather forecast adapted to the station specific conditions
Detection of station measurement anomalies if they occur
Combination of weather station and forecast data within the same system
Efficient workflow as data exchange process is bundled
Forecast can be set up within minutes (plug & play)
Measurement data is optional – the system also functions without measurements
Low operation cost, due to complete automation
Attractive prices for the customer
Options to add other weather related services
Different business models available : revenue share, free exchange of data, others .

Easy access to highest precision weather forecast

meteoblue weather forecast can be accessed through our API with a simple http request for any location worldwide. More than 25 different weather models are used, with a minimum of 10 always available for any location, and downscaled daily with many thousands of weather stations to provide a multi-model forecast of highest accuracy.

No measurements needed
Precision level 85% (<2° MAE on temperature)
2 updates per day
Starting from 6 € per year for each station
All important variables available
Hourly detail
Free one month test

Station specific weather forecast

To reach the highest precision level, the forecast needs to be adapted to the station specific conditions, using it's measurement data. Therefore, the measurements have to be transferred to meteoblue on a daily basis. meteoblue uses the measurements only for internal purposes to respect the property rights of the owner of the data (unless otherwise agreed in the business model). Based on the measurements of the last months, our proprietary artificial intelligence finds the best model combination for the weather station, adapted to the microclimatic situation and according to the actual weather conditions.

Measurement property rights are unaffected
Station specific forecast
Precision level 90% (<2° MAE on temperature)
24 updates per day
Starting from 36 € per year for each station
Hourly detail

Optional services

meteoblue offers a wide range of weather services and decision support tools, that can be implemented within your services. Very frequently requested are:

Pictograms
Meteograms
Weather maps
Precipitation nowcast
Sector specific variables (Energy, Agriculture)

Many other diagrams and data-packages are available for enhancing station-based services, including a unique API with historic weather data, which can be used for verification of station measurements , as well as extending the time range of data available back until 1984.

Data Transmission

Weather forecast data transmission

Weather forecast data can be flexibly accessed through the meteoblue weather API for any coordinates worldwide, via http request. Data can be provided by FTP as well, which is more efficient for a very high number of stations (>10'000) which does not change frequently (as each change on FTP requires a change in setup involving usually some manual metadata exchange).

We need access to your FTP or HTTP server to get the data. We then can integrate the server and use the data for forecast calculations. Therefore, please send us the access details to your server.

You know that the transfer is ok, or that the training with the data happened, when the forecast-API with the StationID delivers data.

We generally query measurements every 10 minutes, as this is required for nowcasting. Usually, it makes sense to also use nowcasting. However, if you are not interested in nowcasting and correcting the past forecast with observations, then we can query data much less frequently, like twice a day.

During development, we'll check our downloaders whether every works. Adding new stations obviously shouldn't change the file format. In consequence, once the export is set up successfully, it should be very safe to scale up to more stations. Of course, in case we should encounter a problem with importing your data at some point, we'll let you know. The mlm still delivers forecast data if your measurement data delivery fails for 2-3 days.

Weather station measurement transmission

Weather station measurements should be provided to meteoblue through an API access via http request. The data of all stations should be delivered in only one file in an readable text format (e.g. TXT, CSV) with a unique StationID for each station.

Measurement specification

For measurement data delivery from our customers station data meteoblue proposes the following procedure and format. meteoblue will download the file from HTTP or FTP server or make an API-call to your system.

Ideally, the most current observations from all stations are submitted in one file every hour. More time steps can be included, e.g. the last 3 hours of observations from all available stations. This is generally a good strategy as the data transfer becomes more robust to compensate for missing data. Double submission of the same values does not cause any problems.

The preferred data format is a simple CSV file:

Note:

StationID, where possible, shall only contain numbers and capital letters and have a length of approximately 8 signs.
The number of decimals of the float can vary arbitrary for any single entry
All stations can be submitted in one file
The order of stations and time step can be absolutely arbitrary. It is not necessary to group all time steps from the same station. It is not necessary to have any order in the time steps.
missing data values have to be set to -999.0

Example: STATIONID,TIME,LAT,LON,HEIGHT,TEMPERATURE,WINDSPEED,WINDDIRECTION,RELATIVEHUMIDITY,DEWPOINT,PRECIPITATION

MYID342-3,2020-12-31 23:58,45.33,-107.234234,432.43,22.8,12.4,320.3,55.5,-999.0,0.02

MysTation223,2020-12-30 22:18,25.33,17.234234,432.43,22.8,13.4,320.3,55.5,-999.0,-999.0

MYID342-3,2020-12-31 22:18,45.33,-107.234234,432.43,-999,15.4,320.3,55.5,-999.0,-999.0

Parameter	Type	Unit	Description
STATIONID	string		Unique identifier of the station, this should never change
TIME	string	UTC-TIME YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm	Specifying when the observation was taken
LAT	float	° (WGS84 / GPS coordinates)	Latitude of the station, negative values for South (range -90 to 90)
LON	float	° (WGS84 / GPS coordinates)	Longitude of the station, negative values for West (range -180 to 180)
HEIGHT	float	m asl	Altitude where the station is located, this is not the measurement height above ground
TEMPERATURE	float	°C	Air temperature
WINDSPEED	float	m/s	Wind speed
WINDDIRECTION	float	°	Meteorological standard convention: 0° = wind coming from North; 90° = wind blowing from the east; 180 = wind coming from South
RELATIVEHUMIDITY	float	%	relative humidity
DEWPOINT	float	°C	dewpoint temperature
PRECIPITATION	float	mm	precipitation within the last hour

Further service specifications

We need measurement data from 10-12 days to deliver mlm forecast data for the respective StationID. Therefore, customers needs to deliver at least 10-12 days real-time data until a station mlm is available.

The StationID only can be called when mlm forecast data is available. Therefore, we recommend to use the standard API with the coordinates of the station, for the first 15 days from start of data delivery, and only then switch to the StationID.

License and Confidentiality

Confidentiality of measurement data

meteoblue confirms, that all measurement data provided is treated according to highest security standards and stored on meteoblue owned servers within Switzerland. The property rights of the measurement data are unaffected and meteoblue confirms to use all data for internal purposes only. Standard non disclosure agreements are included into the contract to assure these conditions.

License of weather forecast data

The weather station provider is free to publish, display and resell the data within the online portal of his weather stations or any other clearly defined product. A yearly fix resale license and service fee of 2400 € is charged to provide the API and FTP access and meteoblue support.

Promotional use

The yearly access fee of 2400 € includes two different API keys, one for commercial and one for promotional use. The requests made on the key for promotional use are free of charge, but their purpose has to be transparently communicated to meteoblue and are only allowed for non-commercial use as promotion (e.g. free test periods for en customer), development and implementation process or benchmarking and validation (results to be provided to meteoblue).