Met Office Blended Probabilistic Forecast for 7,213 UK and European Sites

Probabilistic weather forecasts for 7,213 specific sites across the UK, Ireland, and parts of Western Europe, produced by the Met Office IMPROVER system. The data is derived from operational Numerical Weather Prediction ensembles and nowcasts, blended and calibrated for reliability. It includes 61 parameters like temperature, precipitation, and wind, with hourly forecasts up to 120 hours.

Use Cases

• Assessing site-specific weather risk probabilities based on calibrated ensemble forecasts.
• Training ML models for renewable energy output prediction based on wind and cloud cover parameters.
• Developing operational decision-support tools for agriculture or transport using hourly temperature and precipitation probabilities.
• Comparing forecast reliability across different models (MONOW, UKV, MOGREPS) mentioned in the blending process.

Strengths

• Covers 7,213 specific forecast sites, providing high spatial granularity.
• Includes 61 distinct weather parameters, from temperature to UV index.
• Forecasts are probabilistically calibrated using the IMPROVER pipeline, which suggests a focus on reliability.
• Data is available at hourly timesteps for the first 120 hours, offering fine temporal resolution.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count and total dataset size are unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• The description notes that details like the number of sites may change, indicating potential schema instability.

Provenance

Source

Met Office

Collection Method

Derived from operational NWP ensembles and nowcasts, processed through the IMPROVER Blended Probabilistic Forecast system.

Time Range

Forecasts are provided for lead times up to 186 hours, but the historical archive time range is unspecified.

Freshness

Information is stated as correct as of April 2026, but the last update date for the dataset itself is unknown.

Geography

United Kingdom, Ireland, and parts of Western Europe.