Monthly and yearly rainfall less than Daily rainfall

[JaySmith]

I did read about Cumulus' rainfall calculations but this has me confused.
I left the weather station on but shut down my Cumulus pc for about an hour during a violent electrical storm 2 days ago.

The rainfall readings were a bit wacky afterwards but I assumed catchup would happen.
It did not.
These snippets from 2 screens should tell the story:
Monthly
Highest Hourly Rainfall 2.09 in 7:10 PM on 19 April
Highest Daily Rainfall 0.51 in 15 April

Yearly
Highest Hourly Rainfall 2.09 in 7:10 PM on 19 April
Highest Daily Rainfall 0.51 in 15 April
Highest Monthly Rainfall 1.23 in April

I shut the pc down when I had .04" indicated.
I feed to MADIS and they correctly have a total of 2.21" for the 1-2 total hours of the storm.
I guess they didn't shut down their computer

What happened? How can I prevent this? And how best to fix the records?

Thanks,
JS

[steve]

The WMR928 has no logger, so proper 'catch up' can't occur after you've shut Cumulus down for a significant length of time - any rainfall while it was shut down is likely to be recorded incorrectly. If you zip up the diags folder and attach it, I'll take a look. Cumulus will have seen an apparent sudden large increase in the rain total, so has probably ignored it as bogus for the purposes of the daily total.

You can edit the records using the editors in Cumulus (on the Edit menu).

[JaySmith]

Ah. Did not know about the lack of logger.
I have attached the diags bracketing the event by date.
I turned off the PC early evening on the 19th.
I see there is no diag file for the following day, the 20th.
It resumes on the 21st.

Thank you,
Jay

[steve]

It looks like your today.ini file was corrupt when you started it back up again, the date field didn't match the current date, so it ignored the contents of the file and reset the rain counter for the start of day. So the rain which fell prior to that didn't count to the daily total:

4/19/2015 18:38:18.515 : Looking for C:\cumulus\data\today.ini
4/19/2015 18:38:18.515 : Today.ini exists
4/19/2015 18:38:18.515 : Time now = 4/19/2015 6:38:18 PM
4/19/2015 18:38:18.516 : Read today file: Date = 12/30/1899, LastUpdateTime = 4/19/2015 6:10:00 PM, Month = 4

Compare with the subsequent restart on the 21st, when the date did match, so it carried on with the same start of day counter:

4/21/2015 12:01:23.685 : Time now = 4/21/2015 12:01:23 PM
4/21/2015 12:01:23.692 : Read today file: Date = 4/21/2015, LastUpdateTime = 4/21/2015 11:55:00 AM, Month = 4
4/21/2015 12:01:23.697 : Todayfileraindaystart = 2.12598419189453
4/21/2015 12:01:23.707 : Todayfile is for today

[JaySmith]

That makes sense. I restarted the station with today as the start date.
Thanks