Weather Data

High-quality global weather, climate & environmental observations

SuperPack® Subscription

Speedwell SuperPack® makes available an unprecedented range of weather / climate observations for a single annual fee. These include historical data and on-going feeds.

As a corporate license, all users within a company have unlimited access to our global database of surface observations. Our library of gridded data is also available through SuperPack® Premium

In addition to the data archive, users also have access to Speedwell web tools including Analogue Years, Actuals vs. Climatology, Index Cone, Population-Weighted Indices and, on request, climate normals.

Product Highlights

Over the past two decades Speedwell has curated an expansive database of global weather, climate, and environmental observations.

This data is available on an on-request basis for one or more datasets, or through SuperPack which provides unlimited corporate-wide access to historical and on-going feeds for various weather elements for over 90,000 reference sites worldwide. Data can be delivered by FTP or accessed by API or downloaded from our Online Inventory tool.

While many of our users have a background in the weather/climate risk transfer market and use these datasets, we also have clients in the energy and agricultural markets.

Our data archives can be searched by clicking on the View the Online Inventory button.

Surface data includes observations taken by instrumentation typically located on the earth’s surface. Meteorological observations taken at weather stations, ocean conditions observed by buoys, river flow measured by hydrological networks.

Speedwell has sourced datasets from global National Meteorological Services and private 3rd party networks. Sourced datasets represent the highest quality data originating from an organization.

Data archives include historical data (typically 50+ years of observations depending upon the station) as well as ongoing observations updated each day.

Data is available as raw or cleaned data. Cleaned data is data that has been processed to detect data errors and missing values. These problematic data points are replaced or filled with estimated observations.

Surface Data is accessible via our web site, API, FTP, and the Speedwell Environmental System.

The Speedwell Database includes:

  • 100,000+ locations (see Online Inventory)
  • Daily, hourly, and sub hourly observations
  • Multiple weather variables including temperature, precipitation, wind speed, snowfall, snow depth, dewpoint…

Gridded datasets are discrete products created by entities such as NOAA, ECMWF, NASA, Australia Bureau of Meteorology and others Gridded data products are developed to provide spatially and temporally consistent data coverage and can be used to supplement or replace existing ground-based observations, which can often be sporadic, irregularly spaced or have fragmented historical records..
Gridded datasets are constructed using inputs including ground-based observations, satellite imagery, rainfall radar, oceanographic measurements. These are then used to run physical models of the type used in weather forecasting to create a series of “reanalysis data” interpolated to regular grids. These are available both at the ground surface and sometimes at levels through the atmosphere. Some products provide full global coverage for a range of variables, others may only provide regional datasets or single variables though these can be at a higher spatial resolution.
 
Speedwell Climate makes available the dataset histories as well as regular updates for a range of gridded products including ERA5 (ECMWF), MERRA-2 (NOAA), ARC2 (NOAA), CHIRPS 2.0 (Climate Hazards Group) and various parameters from the Bureau of Meteorology (Australia) amongst others.
 
Gridded Data products exist to meet a variety of uses, some are well suited to modelling climate change, others for regional drought detection others can provide a useful synthetic (generally homogenous) historical time series to replace or supplement ground-based weather observations. Speedwell systems and software are capable of generating ‘synthetic’ weather stations, regional derived Indices based upon gridded data. Gridded data has become important in modelling solar and wind generated renewable energy production.
 
Gridded datasets are accessible via our web site, API, FTP, and the Speedwell Environmental System.

 
Gridded data can be licenced ad-hoc or through SuperPack® Premium which provides corporate-wide access to a wide range of data.

Indices involve the combination of datasets, variables, and observation points to better model / understand a given system.

Speedwell has developed proprietary methodologies to build indices for the following use cases:

  • Agriculture – Speedwell has produced 120+ indices designed to monitor the meteorological conditions impacting crop regions around the world.
  • Energy – Population weighted indices combine baskets of weather stations to best monitor the weather impacting a given population.
  • Renewables – Utilizing gridded data coupled with an understanding of “installed capacity” the Speedwell Renewable indices depict theoretical power production (MWh) from regional wind and solar production facilities.

Speedwell supports the creation and management of custom indices for client needs. Clients can supply specific index methodologies or Speedwell can work with clients to design custom indices.