Data availability and file format

Message Tables

The Met Office MetDB holds data from a variety of different message types covering observations from satellites, profiling instruments (e.g. radiosondes and wind profilers) and surface based observations (e.g land meteorological recording stations). The BADC has obtained access to an number of the message types that should be of greatest use to the atmospheric research community and the data are stored in a the BADC-CSV format, which is comma separated, plain text, "human" readable and self describing.

The following message types are available through the BADC. Follow the links to see the appropriate table detailing the elements within each message type:

Message Name

Description & Link

AMDARs

Aircraft Meteorological Data Relay

LNDSYN

Land based SYNOP messages

RASS

Radio Acoustic Sounding System messages

SHPSYN

Ship based SYNOP messages (including buoy and fixed platform)

WINPRO

Wind profiler observations

File Format

The data are held in the BADC-CSV file format, each of which will contain one or more data records and are comma separated variables. "Metadata" are provided giving a full description of the content of the data. More information about the file format can be found on the BADC-CSV format page, which also contains two example files taken from the MetDB dataset.

As the data are held as comma separated variable the file should load automatically into programmes such as Microsoft Excel. Alternatively see the following webguide on how to read a text file into Excel:

How to convert a text file to Excel.