Help in gathering previous 24 hours weather data

[Sam Trott]

Hello,

To put it simply I'm a university student, I'm not a terribly good programmer it turns out. I want for my assignment to create an application that displays the temperatures and weather type for the last 24 hours. The problem is regardless of how much time I spent bouncing around the metoffice site I'm no closer to finding the query I want that will give me the data I require. Unless I'm missing some amazing resource, the only thing the site tells you is what it can do and not the format for how to achieve it. I don't mind whether it gives me the last 24 hours of weather data hourly or 3 hourly I just need that data. Furthermore I need to know how to send the query to pull the data as close to a gps location as possible, if that is possible.

To put my idea simply, my application will get the current gps coordinates and use them to display the previous 24 hours of weather data. I obviously don't expect anyone to create the application for me for obvious reasons but any help in regards to the query needed to pull that data using the API would be greatly appreciated. I already know how to get the GPS coordinates so its just the query to send to the API that I require. To my understanding it would look something like:

http://datapoint.metoffice.gov.uk/public/data/val/wxfcs/all/json/lon=111.000&lat=111.000?res=3hourly&key=(my key)

Obviously by that abysmal looking query you can see I have no idea what I'm doing.

TL:DR: What is the query for pulling the previous 24 hours of weather data including the temperature and weather type based on a given set of GPS coordinates

Thanks in advance for any help. 

[Laura Menendez Gonzalez]

Hi Sam,

I've only starting using this system recently but I think your query is wrong, it should be "wxobs" instead of "wxfcs"... saying that, I've tried to obtain data that way and I keep getting a 403 error!!

Have a look at this document, you may find it useful.

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/binaries/content/assets/mohippo/pdf/3/0/datapoint_api_reference.pdf

Regards

[Sam Trott]

Ahh yes I see that mistake now, that link helped me see that. But I still don't understand how I'm supposed to get the weather data closest to me, or whether that's even possible. I mean plenty of weather apps use your GPS (aka Longitude and Latitude) to get the weather data closest to you so one way or another there has to be a way. But I can't seem to find a way for you to use GPS coordinates, it seems to imply you have to know the site location. If that is the case then there has to be some process from a coding point of view to find the closest site to a set of GPS coordinates. I know you can ask for the site locations and that comes with the GPS positions but beyond that I have no idea on how to proceed.