Free weather data for your own farm, and the trap that gives you Dublin's rain

Yes, you can get free weather readings for your own area from Met Éireann. They update to the last full hour, with no app and no login. We checked 27 station names on 28 September 2026. The data is good. But one trap matters: guess a station name wrong and you get Dublin Airport's weather back, with no error and nothing to tell you.

That matters this week. Ground conditions decide whether slurry goes out before the window shuts in early October, and a wrong reading is worse than no reading at all.

What you actually get

Met Éireann runs a public page of station observations behind its farming forecast. The same readings are available as plain data, free, no account needed.

For each station you get one record per hour since midnight. Temperature, rainfall in millimetres, wind speed and direction, humidity, pressure, and a plain description like "Light rain showers".

At 07:00 on 28 September, Oak Park in Carlow read 5°C, humidity 97%, rainfall 0.0 mm, wind 4 km/h from the south. That is enough to know whether ground is drying or sitting wet.

Where the rain actually was

Here is the full overnight picture, midnight to 07:00 on 28 September 2026:

Station	Rain 00:00–07:00
Belmullet	2.41 mm
Claremorris	1.80 mm
Newport, Mayo	0.70 mm
Mace Head	0.62 mm
Athenry	0.10 mm
Shannon	0.01 mm
Oak Park, Ballyhaise, Dunsany, Gurteen, Johnstown Castle, Moore Park, Mullingar, Roche's Point, Valentia	0.00 mm

Mayo and Galway took all of it. Belmullet's 2.41 mm arrived almost entirely in one hour, 1.9 mm between 02:00 and 03:00. Everywhere east and south of the Shannon was dry overnight, with a cold morning behind it: 4°C at both Moore Park and Mullingar.

Does it get your own station right?

This is where it falls down, and it is worth knowing before you rely on it.

We guessed ten station names the obvious way, lowercase and no spaces. Seven came back correct. Three came back as Dublin Airport when they should not have — complete readings, correctly formatted, a normal successful response, nothing flagged anywhere.

Then we asked for a station called totalnonsensexyz. It also returned Dublin Airport.

So an unrecognised station name does not produce an error. It hands you Dublin's weather. The only thing that tells you is a name field in the response, which nobody reads when the numbers look fine.

The names that caught us out are the ones a farmer would guess first:

What you would type	What you get	What actually works
moorepark	Dublin Airport	moore-park
oakpark	Dublin Airport	oak-park
corkairport	Dublin Airport	cork
knockairport	Dublin Airport	knock
shannonairport	Dublin Airport	shannon

Most multi-word stations take a hyphen: oak-park, moore-park, roches-point, mace-head, johnstown-castle. Dublin Airport does not, and its hyphenated form returns an empty list. Cork and Knock are the bare county names, not the airport names.

One rule covers all of it: check the station name that comes back matches the one you asked for. If it says Dublin Airport and you are in Fermoy, you are reading the wrong county.

What it costs

Nothing. No account, no key, no paywall, no rate limit that we hit.

That makes it a real option for a same-day call without paying for anything. Paid apps do other things this does not — forecasting further out, field-level modelling, alerts to your phone. This is observations only, and only for today.

It is also worth saying plainly: this is a free public service, and the readings themselves were accurate and current every time. The problem is only in how a wrong station name is handled, and that is a small fix.

What it cannot do

Three limits, all worth knowing:

1. Today only. There is no history here. Flooding was reported in Waterford and Carlow on the night of 27 September. By 07:00 on the 28th, the whole south-east reads 0.00 mm. Last week's rain is simply not in it.
2. The archive is a separate system. Met Éireann's long-term climate records live elsewhere, and are the right tool for "how wet was August". We could not reach that archive from our own network during this session, so we are not making any claim about it either way.
3. Station coverage, not field coverage. The nearest station can be 30 km away with different ground under it. Treat it as a regional check, not your own yard.

What this means if you use AI to help with the decision

If you paste these numbers into an assistant, the trap gets worse, not better. An assistant cannot tell that the station was wrong. It will summarise Dublin's rain as confidently as your own, and it will sound just as sure.

Two habits fix it, and they cost nothing:

1. Paste the station name in with the numbers, every time. Not "here is the rainfall" but "here is the rainfall at Moore Park, Fermoy". The assistant cannot check what you did not tell it.
2. Ask it to state the station and date back to you before it gives you an answer. If it cannot name them, it is working off something you did not check.

We hit the same problem when we checked the official cattle price sources. Free data is only as good as knowing exactly what it measures.

If you are not pulling data yourself, none of this affects you. Use the farming forecast page below and you will get the right station. The trap only bites when you or somebody building you a tool asks for a station by name.

Frequently asked questions

Is Met Éireann's station data free for farmers to use? Yes. The observations are published free, with no account and no subscription, and we hit no rate limit across 27 station requests in one session. The farming forecast page at met.ie carries the same readings alongside advisories.

How current is it? It updates hourly and runs from midnight to the last completed hour. Our 07:03 check returned eight records ending at 07:00. That makes it usable for a decision you are taking today, which is more than the monthly price and grass datasets can offer.

Can I use it to prove ground conditions for a scheme or inspection? Treat it as a working check, not evidence. The nearest station may be well away from your ground, and this endpoint keeps no history. For anything on the record, go to Met Éireann's historical data service or talk to your Teagasc advisor.

Where to get help

Met Éireann's farming forecast carries the blight advisories and warnings alongside the readings, and it is the right first stop. For grass and grazing decisions on top of the weather, Teagasc Grass10 publishes weekly figures.

For the spreading deadline itself, do not take a date from us or from a weather page. DAFM announced a one-week extension to the slurry spreading window in late September. Confirm the exact date on the DAFM notice before you spread. Our slurry and fertiliser deadlines guide covers the wider calendar.

The bottom line

Free, hourly, current, and good enough to act on today — as long as you check the station name that comes back is the one you asked for.

See all our honest Irish farm tech reviews at Does this actually work?