SMHI Open Data API Docs - Lightning Archive

Download

There are two schema files available to download that are both needed to consume the API.

• portal.xsd contains the generic types.
• lightning_v1.xsd contains the versioned types.

Generic

There are a couple of generic types used by many resources. They use the namespace https://opendata.smhi.se/xsd/portal.xsd and are not subject to the API versioning system.

linkType and linksType

A linkType represents a link to another resource. It consist of:

• rel - the mediatype of the target resource ( application/xml )
• type - the xsd type of the target resource ( parameter )
• href - the url to the target resource ( https://opendata-download-lightning.smhi.se/api )

A linksType represents a set of linkType with additional information. This information contains a title to describe the resource, a summary for extra description and updated which represents the last time the target resource, or underlying subresources, was updated. This can be useful to deside if data is stale or not without traversing down to the actual data. The linksType is used to represent the next level. For instance the Category type uses a list of linksType to represent all the Versions available. The linkType in this case refers to the different Versions in different formats.

Besides links to the same resource or the next resource in different formats, linkType are also used to refer to other useful resources. Here are some examples.

• Parent resources
• Metadata rel="iso19139"

...

geoBox and geoLinksType

geoBox represents an area of interest devided by minLatitude, maxLatitude, minLongitude and maxLongitude.

The geoLinksType is a regular linksType but with an additional geoBox.

...

category and version

The category and version types are used for versioning. The version element in category links to the different versions of the API that can be used. Versions are incremented when changes are made to the API. There is one special version called latest. This version is virtual and always points to the latest version of the API. It is not recomended to use this in any application as it might be redirected without notice. Instead try to use the version with the highest number as these do not change. Older versions will be deprecated and only maintained for a couple of months.

The version type contains links to all available years published.

...

Specific

The rest of the types are versioned and uses the namespace https://opendata.smhi.se/xsd/lightning_v1.xsd. Common to these main types are

• key - resource identifier
• update - timestamp of last modification time
• title - the name of the resource
• summary - description of the resource

They also contains link to other resources such as to themself in other mediatypes and more specific links to the next level.

lightningYear, lightningMonth and lightningDay

lightningYear represents a year. It contains linksType to all months that produces data for the specific year.

lightningDay represents a day. It contains linksType to all datafiles for the specific day.

lightningMonth represents a month. It contains linksType to all days that produces data for the specific month.

...

It is notable that the links to data points to zip-archives with rel set to data and type set to application/zip