Hi,
I work with the Climate Reference Network ( http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/crn/ ), which provides data similar to that released by the Met Office, but on a national scale for the U.S. We attempt to provide extremely high-quality data (using triplicate measurement for temperature and precipitation, for example, and extensive quality control). Data can be explored at http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/crn/observations.htm , and full datasets can be downloaded at ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/uscrn/products/ . Just wanted to let y'all know that it's out there as another resource, and I'd be curious to hear about it if anyone does any visualization work with our data.
-Egg Davis