Air quality forecast

[Mark Jackson]

Hi

Are there any plans to include the air quality forecasts in DataPoint? They must now be operational since they have recently been adopted by Defra for the national air quality forecasts. I understand that they use the same site locations as the 5-day weather forecast so they would fit in well.

Thanks

Mark

[Chris Wood]

I must say I was initially surprised to see that the data wasn't included [I had plans to create a heatmap of air pollution overlaid on a Google map while sitting at the back of a particularly pointless meeting last week(!)]; I'd guessed that the Met Office and Defra have an agreement about how the data can be released.  Defra do allow you to view the data, but only through their website (http://uk-air.defra.gov.uk/networks/find-sites), and not through any kind of useful API (yet).

Chris

[MetOffice DataPoint]

Providing Air Quality is in the plans, but the team required to do the work have quite a long list of work to get through already so I am not expecting it to be available as quickly as you might like.

 

Regards

 

Clare

[Mark Jackson]

Thanks for the update.

I also have a suggestion for how they should be provided. It would be extremely useful to have access to the output as gridded hourly concentrations (e.g. WCS netCDF), not just the daily API values at the sites. This would bring your forecasts to a similar level of openness as the EU MACC ensemble forecasts for Europe, which are used as input in your forecasts. MACC forecasts are already freely available as hourly concentrations in netCDF. http://www.copernicus-atmosphere.eu/

Regards

Mark