Month.ini
Introduction
The log file "month.ini" is where Cumulus software tracks the extremes for this month, the file is divided into a number of sections headed by a name in square brackets []. The sections (after the first [General]) can be in any order, Cumulus will maintain whatever order the sections are currently in. Each section has a number of parameters listed below it. Each parameter is in the format "attribute=value". For readability you can insert blank lines into this file, Cumulus will not mind. Do not however introduce any punctuation nor change the format of any parameter line.
This log file holds the information that feeds the Webtags#Monthly for the 'thismonthT.htm' web template. So you won't find the monthly rainfall total in this file, that is not in that template.
Prior to Cumulus 1.9.2 (build 1002 - 5 July 2011)
There was no monthly functionality in Cumulus.
Prior to Cumulus 1.9.3 beta build 1053
Before this release, Cumulus did not update and save this log file correctly if Cumulus restarted between midnight and 0900/1000 on 1st of month. Put simply, earlier builds started a new month on first day of each month even if the new meteorological month had not started.
Differences between Cumulus 1 and MX versions of file
Any date/time entries are in different formats as this example from the wind section shows. Also note that Cumulus 1 will use a comma for representing the decimal point if that is how a decimal point is defined for the locale defined in your device, but Cumulus MX always expects periods/full stops in .ini files regardless of the locale in use. Thus if you want to swap from Cumulus 1 to Cumulus MX during a month, you will copy your existing Cumulus 1 "data" folder to within your MX installation, but you will also need to manually edit your month.ini file so all the date/time entries are converted to the format shown for MX in the table below. (Note that as Cumulus 1 and MX cannot be run together accessing the same weather station, the dates in the two columns do not match).
The wind speed and gust speed may be shown as integers if that is how your weather station outputs them, and you have not asked Cumulus to calculate them in different units.
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|---|---|
| [Wind] | [Wind] |
| Speed=33,5540428161621 | Speed=7 |
| SpTime=12/03/2019 12:39:35 | SpTime=2019-03-16T15:11:32 |
| Gust=42.8843040466309 | Gust=20 |
| Time=12/03/2019 14:50:45 | Time=2019-03-16T12:45:00 |
| Windrun=29,2999992370605 | Windrun=29.2999992370605 |
| WindrunTime=11/03/2019 23:59:01 | WindrunTime=2019-03-10T19:54:00 |
Retaining month.ini after month changes
In Cumulus MX, at the end of each month, the final month.ini for that month is renamed monthYYYYMM.ini (where YYYY denotes the year using 4 digits and MM denotes the month using two digits) e.g. month201703.ini, thus ensuring that statistics for all past months remain accessible.
There is no obvious facility to achieve a similar retention automatically in Cumulus 1, although all the information can be generated by doing calculations from the relevant lines in dayfile.txt and those calculations are very easy to code in SQL if the daily summary is available in a database. However, there is an inefficient (because there is no facility within Cumulus 1 to perform an action only when month ends, and this technique therefore adds an action each time Cumulus does an update) work-around using the "extra files" feature that you can include "<currentlogfile>":
ExtraLocal25=data\month.ini ExtraRemote25=data\month<currentlogfile>.ini ExtraProcess25=0 ExtraUTF25=1 ExtraBinary25=0 ExtraRealtime25=1 ExtraFTP25=0
This will save a file with a name like monthMar19log.txt.ini in your data folder. Note that there might be changes to month.ini after the last time the above work-around copies it, because the copy happens before the end of the month rollover and so will not pick up any extremes recorded in closing seconds of the month.
Meaning of the different parameters
You have probably worked out that the attribute Speed in the examples in the above table is the maximum wind speed, that Gust is the maximum gust speed in the month and that Windrun is the maximum daily wind run. Those are the three rows that appear in the wind section of the table in the thismonth.htm web page. But you might be puzzled that the web page only shows a date for the maximum daily wind run, yet the month.ini entry includes a time. All that means is there was no wind after that time on that day, in Cumulus 1 if you edit your template thismonthT.htm and specify <#MonthWindRunHD format=HH:nn> you will see the time appear instead of the date. Put simply, the date/time entry is when Cumulus last updated that figure. In this particular case its calculated wind run never exceeded that figure in this month, so the entry has not been updated.
In the [Temp] section, some of Steve's attribute names might be slightly less obvious. Low= is obviously the lowest temperature in the month and High= the highest. Comparing entries against the web page; Highest Minimum is obviously HighMin= and HighRange= the Highest Daily Range. All the rest are easy to work out. For the date/time entries High is frequently (not in 'HighRange' example) abbreviated to 'H', Low to 'L' and the characters 'Time' are appended.
Dealing with Errors
The diagnostic logs in the 'diags' sub-folder record before and after values for updates to highs and lows for monthly and annual extreme records, and can help if this file is corrupted by a false extreme. The stored values can be corrected (in Cumulus 1, there is no editor in Cumulus MX) using the This month's records screen on the Edit menu. Date, Time and Decimal formatting is as per your regional settings on the PC running Cumulus. If you cannot find the file see this FAQ. With MX, you would need to use an external text editor that does not add any additional control characters (see forum for suggestions).
Viewing in Cumulus 1
These lows and highs and their timestamps can be seen (in Cumulus 1) by picking the Highs and Lows - This month screen from the View menu, see screenshot above. Like alltime.ini the file has section headings with lists of properties (attribute = value). For more information on this file see in the Cumulus help file, in the section “Data log file format”.