Last Hour Rain Total

[KJ4KTW]

Hello all. After browsing around the forum it seems everyone has the opposite issue that I have. Whenever it rains, the "Last Hour" rain amount will show no more than .03 inches. That is my high record, that is the only thing it will show. For example, as I write this, over .73 inches of rain has fallen and been recorded by the weather station in a little over 30 minutes. Still, the "Last Hour" box still only shows .03 and will continue to show that until it stops raining. Anybody have any idea for a fix? I'm using the latest Cumulus software with a Davis VantageVue station on a USB connection to Windows XP.

[steve]

Please zip up the diags folder and attach it, together with your jun13log.txt file.

[KJ4KTW]

Here you go. Thanks for the quick reply.

[steve]

You've set a 'spike removal' setting for max hourly rain of 1.00 mm, so anything above that is ignored.

[KJ4KTW]

That's odd...I don't remember setting such a thing. I'm assuming this is in the Calibration settings but what is even more curious is that in the Spike Removal section, there is also 1.0 mm/hr for the Max Rain Rate setting but that seems to not be in effect. I will change it accordingly unless there is somewhere else I need to alter this setting?

[steve]

The rain rate spike figure doesn't apply to Davis stations as the figure is supplied by the station.

The default values for the spike removal settings are 999, so they would normally have no effect. The only ways to change them are by using the calibration settings screen, or by editing cumulus.ini while Cumulus is stopped. The 'max hourly rain' setting is the only one which applies to Davis stations, and that's only because I didn't bother checking for the station type in the code, which is common to all station types. I wouldn't normally expect Davis stations to need any spike removal. Presumably your settings are there from when you had a Fine Offset station; but a setting of 1 mm is too low anyway.

[KJ4KTW]

Thanks, Steve! That would also explain why my wind gusts never seemed higher. I'm guessing that I changed these values from default back before I had the Davis station in an effort to make my readings more reliable. I'm resetting them all to the default values now. Thanks again for the quick help!