Edit > Today's Rain - Cumulus v1.9.4 (1086)

[Buford T. Justice]

I think I may have found a bug as I cannot remember this not ever working before. I have Cumulus installed to two separate folders. One for Fahrenheit/Imperial measurements and the other for Celsius/Metric measurements. When it rains, I sometimes need to modify the total as I trust my 4" CoCoRaHS Stratus Rain Gauge.

It seems to me I could edit the total rainfall using EDIT > TODAY'S RAIN, enter the corrected value, hit APPLY then QUIT, and it would be OK. I would then close whichever Cumulus version I had running and open the other and perform the same function converted to metric if needed. After closing that Cumulus and opening the first one again, the corrected measurement would still be shown. It now seems with build 1086 that no longer happens. The corrected total is forgotten and becomes either 0.00" for imperial and 0.0 mm for metric.

[steve]

If I understand correctly, you have two separate installations of Cumulus and run them alternately with the same station? One installation is completely independent of the other, nothing you do to one can affect the data in the other. So if there's a bug, it will just be related to closing Cumulus down and starting it up again.

If you zip up the diags folder for one of them and attach it, I'll take a look. Preferably the metric one, and please tell me when you changed the total, what you changed it from and what you changed it to (as closely as you can remember). This code hasn't changed for a long time, so if there's a bug, it's not a new one in 1086. But you haven't said which version you were using previously...

[Buford T. Justice]

Yes they are both installed to two separate folders. Windows thinks it is C:\Cumulus but I have it as C:\Cumulus\Cumulus F for Fahrenheit/Imperial and C:\Cumulus\Cumulus C for Celsius/Metric. I am sure that is not the issue as I have done that for about a year now.

As for version, I am pretty sure I used every 1.9.4 version beta and the 1085 release which was replaced by 1086.

Today is actually a perfect day for this. I just closed the Cumulus F and opened Cumulus C. It rained 0.14" so that is 3.556 mm. Cumulus C right now reports 3.9 mm so it is showing too much. I click on EDIT > TODAY'S RAIN. It shows 3.900. I change that to 3.556, click APPLY, then click QUIT. After a few seconds, 3.9 mm changes to 3.6 mm. Now I click on X to close Cumulus. I wait about 10 seconds or so and reopen the metric version. And upon reopening, it is perfectly fine. Hmmm.

Yesterday when this was happening, my electronic rain gauge was frozen so I would be increasing the reported rain instead of subtracting from it like today. I know after opening it, it reverted to 0.0 mm for today's rain. After closing and opening the monthly log file, I could see the zeros for today's rain below the corrected total I made earlier. There are some diags from yesterday in the attachment.

[steve]

Increasing the rain for today is achieved by decreasing the start of day figure. At start up, if the start of day figure is negative, I use this as an indication that this is the first rain reading since installing Cumulus (so the rain for today starts from zero). Your rain counter is close to zero, so when you add rain the start of day figure goes negative. Have you reset the rain gauge recently to cause the counter to be reset?

[Buford T. Justice]

I did recently replace the batteries in the transmitter.

[steve]

That's presumably reset the rain counter to zero.

You're using the rain editor for a purpose for which was not intended. It is to fix the large increases in rain that can occur with Fine Offset stations. I provided it as an easier method than editing today.ini, which some people seemed to struggle with. It's not for entering rainfall manually. Cumulus isn't intended for recording manual observations, it's for recording the data from an automatic weather station.

If you want edit the rain total for each day, you would be better editing dayfile.txt the following day.

[Buford T. Justice]

I think I will have to stick with my system which worked fine until the recent battery replacement a few days or so ago. Even Met uses the manual rain gauge instead of the electronic ones for the actual total rainfall. I also double check dayfile.txt to make sure it is right.