If you're really interested in the weather, one of the best ways to learn more and to keep track of the weather in your area or anywhere in the world is to grab a copy of Digital Atmosphere (DA) and begin exploring.
Digital
Atmosphere is Tim Vasquez's excellent and inexpensive
program for plotting and analysing real-time raw weather data freely available
on the Net. Visit Tim's site at Weather Graphics, or participate in the active Weather Graphics Forum where you'll find many like-minded people from around the globe who use DA to satisfy their fascination with weather, or in connection with their professional or recreational activities.
On the links below, you'll find Australian weather data formatted for use in DA. Hourly automatic weather station data is available 15 minutes past each hour, while more detailed 3-hourly synoptic data is also available. If you want to explore farther afield, global data is also available for surface and upper air observations, and more. Use the links below.
Australian data from AWN:
(Available 15 minutes past each hour with an update to catch late reports at H+45)
These links lead to folders containing data for each hour for this year. Data for previous years is available in zipped files.
The data is in standard international SYNOP format that is understood by DA, but please see these notes on my treatment of rainfall.
Global data
A number of sites are available for global surface, upper air and other data which, of course, includes Australia. Some of these are listed below. Please note that they are mostly University sites, and they sometimes go offline for periods from a few hours to a few days due to technical hitches. If one site is down, try another. These sites, and others, are listed in the Data Retrieval menu on DA which allows you to download data for the time you want automatically. Usually, synoptic surface reports are in the /syn directory, upper air reports in /upa and hourly metar reports in the /sao directory.
Station information
DA's station list is carried in the file digatmos.stn. Stations change from time to time, and if you want to get the latest station information and edit your digatmos.stn file, you can do so from the following resources:
- Australian station information - see this ftp directory on the Bureau of Meteorology's site. The latest files are named stations.txt and stations_aero.txt. These are almost the same, but the aero file also carries 3/4 letter station IDs and aerodrome heights. The other files in this directories are archives and station lists broken into states. The station lists are updated weekly. These lists are pretty large as they include all Bureau stations, including rainfall only sites, that have ever operated.
- Global station information - this is available from the World Meteorological Organisation in this ftp directory. Look for the file named Pub9volAYYMMDD.flatfile, where YYMMDD is the latest date.
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