Cape Town weather reports and daily highs since 2020

Each row is one METAR or SPECI weather report from Cape Town (FACT), since January 2020, via Iowa Environmental Mesonet. 84,120 reports of temperature, wind, pressure, visibility with the day's highest and lowest reading.

Coverage

• Window: 2020-01-01 to the most recent completed day, refreshed each morning. Report times are UTC; the calendar date is on South Africa Standard Time (UTC+2) all year, no daylight saving shift, so every day is the same 24 hours.
• Grain: one row per report; 2,420 days from 2020-01-01 to 2026-09-08 at the first build. Routine METAR reports arrive about hourly; special SPECI reports arrive when conditions change. A typical month holds 938 to 1,147 rows.
• Cadence: one new day of reports each morning; the day's high and low are final once the day's last report is in.
• Station: Cape Town International Airport, ICAO code FACT, the station whose reports settle daily temperature questions for Cape Town.

Columns

• station — the ICAO code of the reporting station, always FACT.
• event_time_utc — the report time in UTC.
• observation_type — METAR for a routine report, SPECI for a special report.
• local_standard_date — the calendar date on South Africa Standard Time.
• temp_f, dewpoint_f — air temperature and dew point, degrees Fahrenheit. temp_c — air temperature, degrees Celsius.
• relative_humidity_pct — relative humidity, percent.
• wind_direction_degrees, wind_speed_kt, wind_gust_kt — wind direction clockwise from true north, sustained speed and gust, knots.
• altimeter_inhg, sea_level_pressure_hpa — altimeter setting in inches of mercury and sea-level pressure in hectopascals.
• sky_cover_1 to sky_cover_4, sky_base_1_ft to sky_base_4_ft — up to four sky-cover layers with their base height in feet.
• visibility_miles — horizontal visibility, statute miles.
• weather_codes — present-weather codes such as RA, SN, FG, TS.
• precipitation_in_1h — one-hour precipitation, inches.
• peak_wind_gust_kt, peak_wind_direction_degrees, peak_wind_time — peak wind from the report remarks.
• snow_depth_inches — snow depth, inches.
• raw_metar — the original report text.
• metar_high_f, metar_low_f, metar_high_c, metar_low_c — the highest and lowest temperature in any report on the same calendar date, in Fahrenheit and Celsius, derived from the rows.
• cli_high_f, cli_low_f, cli_product, cli_report_type — always null: no National Weather Service climate report exists outside the United States. Kept so every city table shares one schema.

Missing values

Absent fields are null, never zero. A temperature outside -60 to 135 degrees Fahrenheit is treated as a sensor fault and set to null. A trace of precipitation is null. Sky layers beyond those reported are null. The derived daily range is null only on a day with no parsable temperature.

Suitable for

• Reading the day's highest and lowest reported temperature at FACT for any date since 2020, in Fahrenheit and Celsius.
• Reconstructing Cape Town conditions at any hour since 2020.
• Building daily temperature, wind and precipitation series for Cape Town International Airport.
• Checking what FACT reported around a settlement time or a forecast.

Source and rights

Reports are METAR observations from Cape Town International Airport transmitted on the WMO Global Telecommunication System and archived by the Iowa Environmental Mesonet (IEM) at Iowa State University, which asks for attribution. No open licence is asserted for the originating meteorological service's data.