Accessing Met Office DataHub forecasts from a Raspberry Pi

Sunday, August 17, 2025

Introduction

As the Met Office is discontinuing their DataPoint service in late 2025, we’ve recently been converting our weather forecasts page to use DataHub, the replacement service. This provides forecasts in GeoJSON format, and gives much more information and better global coverage than DataPoint did. Here we’ll describe how to access the forecasts from a Raspberry Pi, using Python.

Registering

Like DataPoint, DataHub is mostly free for non-commercial and non-bulk usage. Various types of data are available, and we’re using the global spot 3-hour site-specific forecast. This is free providing you access it fewer than 360 times per day.
DataHub requires you to register, whereupon you’ll be given an api-key. This is a string of characters, and is very long! Over 1600 characters, in our case. Store this somewhere secure and safe.

Getting some data

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