Wind gust

[kiwimum]

Hi - I have a question I am new to this forum thing - I have downloaded the info from my station this morning - last night we had extremely high winds and we read one gust at 56.2km - and there were many more similar - But for some reason it has only down loaded the highest at 39.2 at 5.20pm - it got alot more windy after that time - what has happened to the other information?

[steve]

The station logger only contains the gust value at the time of each logger entry, any higher gusts which occurred between entries are not available to Cumulus. The longer you have have your station logger interval set, the more likely the logger is to miss the peak gusts.

If you believe that the logger entries did contain higher gusts (i.e. Cumulus didn't download all of the logger entries for some reason), please zip up the diags folder and attach it.

[kiwimum]

Sorry I am so new to all of this that I didn't really understand what you meant by logger and logger entry - also how would I "download all of the logger entries for some reason), please zip up the diags folder and attach it."?

[steve]

The "logger" is the area of memory in the station console which holds the data. These values are effectively saved every few minutes according to a setting in the console. I believe 30 minutes is the default. When Cumulus has been stopped (overnight, say) and needs to catch up when you start it up, it uses those entries. So it doesn't have access to every reading in the same way that it does while it's actually running, it only has those entries which were saved every few minutes. The longer the interval between entries, the greater the scope for things like peak gusts being missed - they just aren't there.

You can change the logger interval using the SetLogger utility on the downloads page. The smaller the interval, the less likely it is that values will be missed, but the less time you can run the station without having software running (as the entries will get overwritten). The station holds 4080 entries, so at a 10-minute interval, for example, the memory will last for about 28 days without software running. But you will never get as good results if you close Cumulus down overnight as you would with Cumulus running all the time, even at a 5 or 10 minute interval.

Instructions for attaching the diags folder are in post linked to near the top of the forum where it says "Please click here before posting".