Cumulus Support

Sorry, I've clearly misunderstood what it was you were referring to, and the others here had a much better idea what you were talking about.

The total rainfall column in the monthly log files simply reflects the value of the counter in the station and is used by Cumulus to calculate all the other rain values. It is not intended to be a useful value in itself; it's just a counter and its meaning varies with the type of station. In the case of Fine Offset stations, it can suddenly jump up of its own accord, or suddenly reset to zero. Cumulus tries to cope.

as you no what has gone wrong you could try opening jan15 log with note pad and remove the corrupt lines leaving no spaces. then save it and restart cumulus. you may also have to correct all time records the same way.

Hi Steve & Bruce,

Thanks for all the advice. It looks like it's something that can't really be fixed and from what Steve says the value could change randomly anyway so I'll just give it up and continue doing it the way I have been doing - it's probably easier in the long run than modifying the log file. It works but just an extra step to do every time I download - at least it keeps me busy !

Thanks again,

Robin

steve wrote:The total rainfall column in the monthly log files simply reflects the value of the counter in the station and is used by Cumulus to calculate all the other rain values. It is not intended to be a useful value in itself; it's just a counter and its meaning varies with the type of station.

orphansdad wrote:The total rain value I'm getting is the 12th record in the log file - just after atmospheric pressure. I found the headings elsewhere in the forum and am using them to use the data in an excel file

http://wiki.sandaysoft.com/a/Monthly_lo ... n_the_file
You seem to be using this field in the monthly log as a total for the month in your Excel analysis.

steve wrote: Cumulus does not keep a 'total rain' figure anywhere.

1. Don't use the 12th field in Excel for whatever analysis you are doing. Read again what Steve said (first quote) "it is not ... a useful value in itself".
2. You are editing this field in Excel, but it will jump back to another value when Cumulus logs the next set of measurements, Cumulus does not look at the previous log row when it stores the next row.
3. By decreasing the counter, as you are doing, you are ensuring you will need to do it for ever.
4. There will be no reset when January moves into February, the counter will simply go on increasing.

mcrossley wrote:Bruce is right, correct it in the Cumulus today's rainfall editor. For information, the total in your station is held in the transmitter iirc. The editor will just reset what Cumulus uses as the total at the start of 'today' to get the figure you want (subtracting it from the total sent by the station).

You have correct values being stored in your daily summary log. If you really had "bad data", then you would be following guidance in this quote, but note it would reduce the daily rain to be stored in dayfile.txt by increasing the counter, because as has been said in nearly each response to you, it is the difference in the counter between start of day and now that represents today's rain.

It seems that all this has been caused by my assumption that column 12 was the accumulated rainfall value. From what Steve says this isn't the case so I've been wasting my time trying to use it. I'll ignore this value and use another way to calculate total rainfall. As I said earlier, it's only a minor issue and not worth the effort that's been put into trying to resolve it. Everything else works perfectly.
Thanks for the advice but I'm not expecting any further replies on this topic.