WxData
(Weather Data for Stirling, Scotland)

Weather Symbol

See the main page for the WxTools overview

Description

This data gives a historical record of the weather in Stirling (central Scotland). To be exact, the data is from a weather station at the author's house in nearby Bridge of Allan. The weather stations used were an Oregon Scientific WMR928 (3rd Apr 2003 - 31st Dec 2012), an Oregon Scientific WMR180 (1st Jan 2013 - 28th Feb 2021), and a Fine Offset WH2900/Pro-Signal PSG04173 (1st Mar 2021 onwards).

The true data starts from 3rd Apr 2003; fictitious data has been created for 1st Jan to 2nd Apr 2003 to make up a whole year. Note that UV data is available only from 1st Jan 2013, and solar radiation data from 1st Mar 2021. The data gives absolute (i.e. local) pressures; relative (i.e. sea-level) pressures are approximately 5.1 mb higher as the weather station is at a height of 45 metres.

Individual data files have been compressed with gzip, and the whole archive is compressed with zip. You will therefore need a program such as 7-Zip, Gzip, PeaZip, WinZip or the like to unpack the data, plus a text editor or spreadsheet to use the data (the gzipped data files are plain text). Some editors such as jEdit will allow you edit gzipped files directly.

You can query the current data on the Stirling Weather History web page. The data is packaged up roughly annually and made available in bulk through this download. The last day currently provided is indicated by the History below.

Usage

Each day's data is logged every 15 minutes to a file named nn.dat.gz. This is placed in the directory yyyy/mm. The file contains the following fields separated by one or more spaces. Line endings follow either DOS/Windows (CR, LF) or Unix (LF) conventions. Values are calculated for each logging interval, except rainfall which is totalled since midnight. Each interval generates a line as follows in the log file. The numbers refer to fields, counting from 0 as the start. 

    HH:MM:SS             time of log (0)
    NN.NN NN.N NN.N      wind speed average/minimum/maximum (1-3, m/s)
    NNN NNN NNN          wind direction average/minimum/maximum (4-6, °)
    NN.N NN.N NN.N       outdoor temperature average/minimum/maximum (7-9, °C)
    NN NN NN             outdoor humidity average/minimum/maximum (10-12, %)
    NN.N NN.N NN.N       outdoor dewpoint average/minimum/maximum (13-15, °C)
    NNNN.N NNNN.N NNNN.N absolute pressure average/minimum/maximum (16-18, mb)
    NN.N NN.N NN.N       indoor temperature average/minimum/maximum (19-21, °C)
    NN NN NN             indoor humidity average/minimum/maximum (22-24, %)
    NN                   rainfall total since midnight (25, mm)
    NN.N NN.N NN.N       wind chill temperature average/minimum/maximum (26-28, °C)
    NN.N NN.N NN.N       indoor dewpoint average/minimum/maximum (29-31, °C)
    NN NN NN             UV index average/minimum/maximum (32-34, 0-10 normally)
    NNNN.N NNNN.N NNNN.N solar radiation average/minimum/maximum (35-38, W/m2)

Besides the raw data for each day, various summaries are produced in the same format (except that the first field identifies the day, month or year rather than the hour). These files are placed in the directory yyyy/mm, except for year summaries which appear in directory yyyy.

Cnn.dat.gz
day data condensed into a single-line summary
Wnn.dat.gz
week data comprising seven lines of condensed day summaries
CWnn.dat.gz
week data condensed into a single-line summary
Mnn.dat.gz
month data comprising 28 to 31 lines of condensed day summaries
CMnn.dat.gz
month data condensed into a single-line summary
Ynnnn.dat.gz
year data comprising 12 lines of condensed month summaries
CYnnnn.dat.gz
year data condensed into a single-line summary

At the top level, uncompressed files give the summaries for days, weeks, months and years:

day.dat
summaries of each day (a concatenation of uncompressed Cnn.dat.gz files), with each line of data ended by Ddd D MM YYYY (short day name, day in week, month and year, e.g. 'Sun 7 10 2004' for 17th October 2004)
week.dat
summaries of each week (a concatenation of uncompressed CWnn.dat.gz files), with each line of data ended by MM YYYY (month and year, e.g. '10 2004' for 13th October 2004)
month.dat
summaries of each month (a concatenation of uncompressed CMnn.dat.gz files), with each line of data ended by MM YYYY (month and year, e.g. '10 2004' for October 2004)
year.dat
summaries of each year (a concatenation of uncompressed CYnn.dat.gz files), with each line of data ended by YYYY (year, e.g. '2004' for 2004)

Licence

This data is free. You can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation - either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

The data is distributed in the hope that it will be useful but without any warranty, without even the implied warranty of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You may re-distribute this data provided you preserve this README file.

History

Version 1.0: First public release, Ken Turner, 24th August 2011

Version 2.0: Second public release, Ken Turner, 17th February 2013

Version 3.0: Third public release, Ken Turner, 12th February 2014

Version 4.0: Fourth public release, Ken Turner, 28th January 2015

Version 4.1: Fifth public release, Ken Turner, 30th March 2015

Version 5.0: Sixth public release, Ken Turner, 11th Feburary 2017

Version 6.0: Seventh public release, Ken Turner, 14th Feburary 2018

Version 7.0: Seventh public release, Ken Turner, 19th Feburary 2019

Version 8.0: Eighth public release, Ken Turner, 27th January 2020

Version 9.0: Ninth public release, Ken Turner, 1st March 2021

Version 10.0: Tenth public release, Ken Turner, 21st January 2022

Version 11.0: Eleventh public release, Ken Turner, 1st February 2023