On 02/06/2014 10:28, John Hall wrote:
In message ,
exmetman writes
Has anyone seen or know about any weather data from Kew observatory
that closed in 1980?

The temperature series dates back as far as I know to 1797 and the
rainfall series even earlier than that. I would ask the UKMO to see if
they could provide it but I know from experience that would be very
costly. I know there was a book on the subject in the various Met
Office libraries I worked at but surely this data should be available
in electronic format nowadays?

A quick websearch turned up a PDF copy of an article about the
observatory by Jim Galvin:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/1...6080581208/pdf

It was first published in Volume 58 Issue 12 of "Weather". It's possible
that the article's references might prove helpful.

The book "A Century of London Weather" by WAL Marshall, published by
HMSO in 1952 has monthly summaries for both Kew and Greenwich, those for
Kew covering the period 1871 to 1949. A few years ago I bought a
second-hand copy. I imagine that if you search for it on Amazon, there's
a good change that some second-hand book dealer will have a copy for sale.

It's a pity that it isn't the observatory's magnetism data that you
want, as I see that the British Geological Survey makes all of that
available online.

For daily data, rather than contacting the UKMO it might be better to
contact the observatory directly, as they might be less bound by the
profit motive. Though the weather side of their operations closed in
1980, they probably still have copies of all the old records.

All the records were taken to the Met Office archives - Eastern Road as
was, now in the archives at Exeter. See
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/learning/library/archive for more info. This
is because the observatory was Met Office and not independent as you imply.

I was at Kew Observatory in the late sixties, there were some
fascinating old documents there; I hope these were kept.