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IMPLEMENTED 3.12.0 - b3134 - BETA: Chill Hours

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sfws
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IMPLEMENTED 3.12.0 - b3134 - BETA: Chill Hours

Post by sfws »

I am unsure how many people benefit from Release 3.11.0 - build 3129 -->> New: Adds support for two sets of Growing Degree Days data

Given MX agreed to implement growing degree days, perhaps it is timely to mention again my request to make daily chill hour increments available, just in case anyone else wants to add their support?.

Currently, Cumulus implements Chill Hours by simply providing a Cumulative figure (appears in today.ini, it did appear in legacy this year web page ever since chill hours first requested (legacy Enhancement request 117)). Posts in this forum from a decade ago suggest there was considerable interest in chill hours back then.

Chill Hours have gone from new default web pages in 3.10.1. The fact that it has gone for 2 weeks now, without anybody making a comment, suggests that perhaps monitoring Chill Hours has gone out of fashion?

I have been using two different ways to calculate and store daily chill hours for a decade, one depends on daily reads of today.ini to store the cumulative figure in my database table, and therefore work out increment by subtraction, the other (based on how Cumulus 1 worked out chill hours during catch-up) looks at each logged reading and if that contains a temperature below the threshold adds in the interval time expressed in hours. There is good agreement between the two calculations (provided logging interval time is short), and it does highlight when MX count jumps presumably because of a hiccup in it reading from the station.

There are, I am sure, other ways to implement this. But my quick vision would suggest
1) when today.ini is being processed to create a new line for dayfile.txt, an extra field for chill hours daily increment is added to end of dayfile.txt (I am not asking for it to be added to MySQL update, so it won't upset any database processing)
2) the calculation of the increment is achieved because whenever "yesterday.ini" is recreated, it can take cumulative figure from today.ini.
3) therefore at time of creating the dayfile.txt line, you have access to both current cumulative figure (today.ini) and previous cumulative figure (yesterday.ini)
4) there is one more complication, Cumulative Chill Hours is reset to zero on first day of the defined season, that means the increment for the last day of season needs to be calculated before the reset to zero
Last edited by sfws on Fri 30 Jul 2021 4:12 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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mcrossley
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Re: Chill Hours

Post by mcrossley »

I'll take a look at this.
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