Cumulus Support

Hi Steve,
Living near the coast we get frequent changes in the weather.This is a tourist area & people check the weather mainly to find out if it is raining. I am a birder & If I am going along the coast to do some birdwatching it is useful to have some idea of the conditions. Is it possible to have the option in Cumulus to select the rainfall in the last 15 minutes rather than the rainfall Rate. I know that people can look at the rainfall graphs to see if it is raining or not but the casual observer probably won't do this. Could an either/or setting box be put in the Configuration settings? This is probably a mammoth task & if so please say no. Just a thought!

Cheers,
Chris

PS in the next week I will be putting some bird photos of my recent trip to Thailand on my website if anyone is interested.

The Fine Offset stations don't supply a rain rate, so Cumulus has to try to calculate one. The current algorithm simply uses the rain in the last five minutes as the rate (e.g. if the rate says 3.6 mm/hr, that actually means there was 0.3mm rain in the last 5 minutes). So what you get now isn't far off what you're asking for. But, yes, it's not 15 minutes.

Cumulus keeps track of the rain over the last hour, so it wouldn't actually be too hard to give an option to calculate the rain over a different period, up to 60 minutes, e.g. the last 15 minutes, but it all starts getting very messy if you want it displaying as the absolute figure rather than the rate. For example, if 3mm had fallen in the last 15 minutes, this would be displayed as 12mm/hr. I don't know whether most people would understand and do the calculation in their head.

I can do it all much better in Cumulus 2

Steve

FWIW, when looking at the WMR928 console I sometimes wonder "wouldn't it be nice to see a figure like minutes since last tip".

As WMR928 owners will know, its console shows the most recent non-zero rate for up to 2 hours, provided there have been at least 2 tips (since obvioulsy you can't get a 'rate' from a single tip), so a minutes since last tip would often be more informative, especially so at the start and end of a rain 'event'.

I'm not suggesting that Steve can modify the console behaviour - but I wondered if anyone else was interested in minutes since last tip? It's not a figure I recall seeing available, or used, elsewhere (but maybe I'm missing something obvious...)?

Hi Steve,
Personally I think that the last hour would be great but I don't know how others feel.

Cheers,

Chris

skyewright wrote:I'm not suggesting that Steve can modify the console behaviour - but I wondered if anyone else was interested in minutes since last tip? It's not a figure I recall seeing available, or used, elsewhere (but maybe I'm missing something obvious...)?

I think that would be useful, too. I'm not sure how easy it would be to get it right in all circumstances, though - restarts, logger data etc. I'll think about it.

Steve

dionaea wrote:Hi Steve,
Personally I think that the last hour would be great but I don't know how others feel.

But Cumulus already displays the rain in the last hour. It doesn't appear on the default web pages (I'm not really sure why not) but you can add it using the <#rhour> tag.

Maybe I should add it to the default index page...

Steve