Rainfall total adjustment

[beeman]

My laptop went down again last night and missed a significant amount of rain at 04:00 and 06:00.

I've edited the month file and the graphs now show rainfall at those times. However on the Cumulus screen the "Today" and "This Month" don't reflect the changes I've made.

I've tried changing the Today file (after closing down Cumulus) but still can't get the display to show the correct values.

Any help appreciated.

[steve]

Today's rain is calculated from the difference between the rain counter at start of day (which Cumulus records as Start= value in today.ini) and the current value (which you can find from the latest entry in nov09log.txt) so to correct 'rain today', with Cumulus stopped you need to edit Start= so that the new difference is correct. With a correct 'today' value then hopefully your monthly value will then be correct.

But I don't really understand why it's gone missing in the first place. If it was running at midnight it will have recorded the start of day figure correctly, so the difference between that and the current value should correctly reflect today's total. If you can't work out why it's wrong, attach your nov09log.txt and today.ini and I'l have a look.

[beeman]

Hi Steve, files attached.

If I edit Today.ini to a value, then as soon as I restart Cumulus the Start= value goes back to zero.

Please note that I've been playing with the files for most of the afternoon so there may be a lot of strange numbers in them - sorry

My monthly total rainfall should be 122mm plus 9mm that has fallen today. Some of that 9mm may not be in the .log file as I've not had Cumulus logging all day.

Many thanks, Dave

[steve]

Your log file has some very odd things in it for the station's total rainfall counter.

At midnight, your station's total rainfall counter was 126.0:

29/11/09,00:00,6.7,85,4.3,1.3,5.8,169,1.0,15.0,985.0,126.0,21.4,44,0.0,7.0,6.7

But then at 08:10, it suddenly resets to zero:

29/11/09,08:10,5.7,84,3.2,7.3,9.4,185,0.0,0.0,984.0,0.0,19.4,46,4.3,6.0,5.7

Then it starts climbing again, until it gets to 8.0:

29/11/09,14:00,6.5,82,3.6,10.3,17.6,148,4.0,8.0,982.0,8.0,20.8,46,13.0,3.0,6.5

And then resets to zero:

29/11/09,14:05,6.5,82,3.6,9.3,14.0,155,4.0,0.0,982.0,0.0,20.7,46,5.8,7.0,6.5

And starts climbing again until it gets to 2.0 at the end of the file:

29/11/09,18:25,6.5,82,3.6,8.9,14.0,149,1.0,2.0,983.0,2.0,21.2,45,13.0,3.0,6.5

So it looks like you have some sort of problem with your station where it keeps resetting its counter. Cumulus is struggling to get today's figure correct, because it relies on the station's total rainfall counter doing sensible things. Assuming that 2.0 is still the current value, you're not going to be able to get Cumulus to show more than 2.0 for today's rainfall no matter what value you put in today.ini. How much rain do you think you've actually had today, and what value were you putting in today.ini to try to achieve that?

[beeman]

Steve, the laptop stopped again overnight at about 01:00 (that is the subject of another of my posts!). It was 8:10 that I rebooted it. Then we had a couple of short power cuts during the day - 14:00 would correspond to the re-set to zero you found.

I reckon we've had 10mm today looking at a couple of local weather stations on Weather Underground. I was putting 10.00 into the Start= field in today.ini

[steve]

I reckon we've had 10mm today looking at a couple of local weather stations on Weather Underground. I was putting 10.00 into the Start= field in today.ini

The problem with putting Start=10 is that the current counter is only 2, so Cumulus immediately thinks that the counter has been reset, puts the Start= value back to zero, and shows 2 for today. It will probably be easier to leave it until tomorrow and edit dayfile.txt to put in the value for today's total.

[beeman]

OK, I'll have a play tomorrow. Thanks

[beeman]

Sorted !!

I edited the "Yesterday" value in Today.ini and changed the parameter in Dayfile.txt for 29/11/09

Monthly and annual records have been update to the correct values.

Many thanks

Dave

[gemini06720]

Steve, how can I find out what has happened to the Cumulus file (the Nov09log) or to any other files to make the display of the monthly rain at 1656.1 mm when the log file has 799.8 on its last line:

30/11/09,05:00,10.7,81,7.5,1.6,6.4,152,0.0,0.0,1016.94,799.8,25.1,33,0.0,10.7,10.7

I did a search of the file and I could not find any value such as 1656...

[steve]

The monthly rain totals are calculated from the sum of the daily totals in dayfile.txt. So I guess you have one or more bogus values in there. How it/they got there may not be easy to explain, unless the corresponding day(s) in Nov09log.txt show strange things happening to the 'total counter'. That figure of 799.9 which Cumulus uses as the reference counter is actually the station's annual total, in the case of the VP2.

[gemini06720]

Steve thank you for the information.

I just updated Cumulus to the latest release (build 881) and without modification to any file, the display of "This Year" rainfall (on the Cumulus main screen) has gone from 1656.1 mm to 1827.5 mm ... and it has not been raining for the past hours... (now really confused).

I guess the best way to try correcting the wrong information will be to go though the 'Nov09log.txt' file and check for wrong entries ... and that is a very long file to go through...

Is there another place where I could correct/edit the year rainfall - a new month is starting tomorrow...

[steve]

It's dayfile.txt that you need to edit, it's the daily totals in there that are used to calculate the monthly (and annual) totals. But did this happen today? If so the 'wrong' figures won't be in dayfile.txt yet, and I would have expected today's figure to be showing a large incorrect figure. It sound as though Cumulus got a zero back for one the rain total readings, decided that the counter had been reset and then attributed all of the counter value in one go when it appeared again.

Is 799.9 likely to be your correct annual total?