converting Weatherlink databases to Cumulus database files?

[Jim_AFCB]

Hello everyone.

Long-time user of Davis Weather Monitor II - after 14 years I have decided to retire it from active service and have aquired a Vantage Pro 2 at an excellent price (Thanks John Dann/Prodata!)

Just playing with it on an old laptop, have installed Virtual VP, WL and Cumulus and all seems to be good, so planning to install the VP ssensors and move the main weather function to that on Saturday.

Anyway.. I would like to try and import my 14 years of data into Cumulus if I can.

I know that there is no direct way to do this from the .wlk files, but I know that one can export the data in plain text delimited by commas. THere is always Excel to manipulate the data as well.

Question is.. has anyone attempted this? i.e. removed/re-ordered the columns and managed to save it in a format and in the correct order for Cumulus to read?
If it's been tried and no-one has got it to work then I will know not to waste my time trying!!

[steve]

It's possible, but not straightforward. Building the dayfile.txt file is an added complication. I do have a program which will do the conversion, but it's really just intended for filling in short sections if your Cumulus data is corrupt or missing for a period, and you have the WL data for the period. It needs a bit of manual setting up, and it doesn't do the dayfile anyway, so I'm not really sure it's what you're looking for.

Another 'gotcha' is that Cumulus has a sort of deliberate Y2K-bug-in-reverse. I make assumptions in various places that none of the data is older that 1/1/2000, just to make things easier for myself.

Having said that, it may be possible eventually to do an import of the WL data into Cumulus 2 more easily than the current version.

[Jim_AFCB]

Thanks for the input, Steve.

As I moved the station to this current location in October 2000, I would convert my data back to the beginning of 2001.
I would just do it month by month (as I gather that is how the data is arranged in Cumulus?) - is the dayfile.txt just covering the current day? In which case I'm not too worried about that, just the monthly files so that I have a good chunk of my archives in there.

[steve]

The dayfile.txt file holds a summary of each day (highs/lows, total rainfall etc). As well as being available for 'external' analysis, Cumulus uses it internally to generate its monthly (etc) summaries. I think the only benefit of just having the monthly logs would be that you could use the 'Select-A-Graph' to display the data graphically.

[dane]

I have previously done conversions from Easyweather.dat files to Cumulus1 files, and am right now involved in doing a conversion of data from FreeWX to Cumulus1 files.

One of my conversion programs takes as input 1 or more concatenated Cumulus1 monthly files and generates a Cumulus1 dayfile.txt plus info about highs/lows for Cumulus1's "All time records".

So I can definitely do that part for you.
And if you have a description of the contents of your original input files I might be able to do the conversion to monthly files relatively easily.

(My conversion code is written in REXX, not too well commented, and requires a fair bit of manual adjustments. So not really portable )

Send me a PM if you are interested

[Jim_AFCB]

Thanks for the replies.

Understood that the only benefit would be using the old data in 'select-a-graph'.

Also realised that I can manually edit the all-time records, so I dont think I will worry about doing imports.

Cheers everyone.