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Cumulus allows some control over the time that "Today" begins:
# You can define the log rollovertime. Choose between 9am or midnight.
* For the weather diary feature (originally called "The Log" if you have a very old release or look at old posts on the support forum), Cumulus classifies what you enter by a date. The hour of the day, when that date is first applied, is set in the configuration by the '''SnowDepthHour''' (called that as the only tag name available in the legacy Cumulus was for Snow Depth.
# For the weather diary feature '''SnowDepthHour''' The default SnowDepthHour is 0
** The default snow depth hour is 9 for the legacy Cumulus and 0 for MX.
* Readings from your weather station are assigned to the "Today" based on 3 options for [[Meteorological day]] ▼*# starting at 9:00 am, based on winter time, so switching to 10:00 during Daylight Saving (summer) time, or ▼*# starting at 9:00 am, all year round, or ▼*# aligned with calendar days, so today starts at midnight ▼
▲* Readings from your weather station are assigned to the "Today" based on 3 options for [[Meteorological day]]
The practice for professional meteorologists varies between nations, some of the traditional practices listed below have been abandoned now most weather reading is by machines:
▲*# starting at 9:00 am, based on winter time, so switching to 10:00 during Daylight Saving (summer) time, or
* Generally, Meteorologists report snowfall, and snow days, on a calendar day basis (i.e. midnight to midnight).
▲*# starting at 9:00 am, all year round, or
* Most frequently, the Lowest temperature for a day is that recorded prior to the start time for Highest temperature.
▲*# aligned with calendar days, so today starts at midnight
** This is because Meteorologists in the past took manual observations at one, or more, fixed times during each day (9 a.m. was the most common, and the closest lowest temperature was generally earlier that morning, while the closest highest temperature was generally the following afternoon)
* Sunshine hours were recorded from sunrise to sunset, so assigned to "Today" aligned with calendar day
* The way that total rainfall was reported varied:
** Some nations assigned used days that ended at 9 a.m. so rainfall was recorded against the end date
** Sometimes totals were recorded separately for 9 a.m to 3 p.m, with 3 p.m. to 9 a.m being assigned to next day (again these were manual observation times)
** In other cases, the total for 9 p.m to 9 a.m was recorded separately, and possibly assigned to the day after the total for 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.
Cumulus does not support most of these practices. The independence of the start time for weather diary and weather station related web tags means needs to be remembered when labelling web tags from the two tables below. It Steve Loftwas assumed that you would use 9 a.m. as start time for both, but not care when snow fell, as it often has in the UK, after Summer Time has begun, so weather station tags were by default reporting from 10 a.m. local time and snow as at 9 a.m.
In MX, if you choose 9 a.m. (optionally 10 a.m. in summer) for rollover, so all the standard derivative are assigned to the date the meteorological day starts as Today, but the sunshine hours recorded against today will be from midnight on the said date.
If there is no entry in Weather Diary for the day explained above, reports zero.
[[File:Badge vMx.png]] Input is to 2 decimal places. Available from version 3.1.1 - build 3054 when weather diary editor was added to MX. MX allows output in centimetres with decimal places without any script. You can't change the units shown in admin interface, but your value can be input as inches to 2 decimal places if you ignore "cm" that is displayed in that interface.
[[File:Badge v1.png]] Input and output is always as integer. Available from very early builds, weather diary input amended from version 1.8.6 14th April 2009 to allow units to be specified on diary edit screen. If you choose to enter as whole millimetres, you can use JavaScript (or another script language) on your web page to divide the web tag by 10 and get centimetres to 1 decimal place on output.
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|colspan="2" style="background:pink;"|MX only
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|<#snowlying>
| [[File:Badge vMx.png]] Available from version 3.1.1 - build 3054. If there is no entry in Weather Diary for the day explained above, , this web tag returns Nullnull. Otherwise reports 1 if tick in diary, 0 is unticked.
[[File:Badge v1.png]] Although this tag is not available in Cumulus 1, your web page can use a script to check if <#snowdepth> is non zero, as that means snow is lying
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|<#snowfalling>
| [[File:Badge vMx.png]] Available from version 3.1.1 - build 3054. If there is no entry in Weather Diary for the day explained above, , this web tag returns Nullnull. Otherwise reports 1 if tick in diary, 0 is unticked.
[[File:Badge v1.png]] Not available in Cumulus 1. There is no web page workaround, unless you write a script that reads [[Weather Diary]] and makes relevant information available on your web server.
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==Today.ini==
As explained earlier, these tag names relate to latestthe current [[Meteorological day]] and they are populated from information held in [[today.ini]], as the sub-section title suggests; except for Sunshine Hours which relate to latest Calendar day and can be taken from either [[yesterday.ini]] or "today.ini" depending on (respectively) whether before or after rollover time if that is not midnight.
Where a tag name reports a value specific to a past time in today-so-far, there will also be a tag name that can give the time of day, shown in same row of table below. For those that cover whole day so far, the final column contains "n/a". Please note none of the time tags can be modified by output parameters to give a date, but they can be changed from the default time format that is 'H:mm' (24 hour clock notation without leading zero for hour) for Cumulus 1 and MX.
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