POI

Overview

POI (“Point Of Interest”) is the DWD’s set of current weather reports: for every station it forecasts for, it publishes the hourly observations of roughly the last day — air temperature, dew point, humidity, pressure, wind, gusts, precipitation, cloud cover and base, visibility, sunshine, snow depth and the coded present and past weather, plus the previous day’s temperature and wind extremes.

The data is published as one CSV file per station under weather_reports/poi (<station_id>-BEOB.csv, the station id padded to five characters with underscores). Files are latin-1 encoded, use , as the decimal separator and --- for a missing value, and are timestamped in UTC. No authentication is required.

This is the observed counterpart to MOSMIX: the two share the MOSMIX station catalogue, and a station keeps the same id in both, so a forecast can be compared against what was actually measured. About 970 of the catalogue’s ~5600 stations report, in Germany and abroad.

Two of the file’s 41 columns are not served: the 24-hour global and direct radiation. They are declared in W/m², which a 24-hour figure cannot be, and measured against the daily total the hourly column sums to they come out proportional with a factor of 1.573 — a real daily total in a unit that is neither J/cm², kJ/m² nor W/m². Sum radiation_global_intensity over a day for the daily total, or take it from Observation.

Only the last day is served. Older values come from Observation once the DWD has quality-checked them; the present_weather code table is documented here.