FAQ: Difference between revisions

57 bytes added ,  5 June 2020
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Cumulus calculates these when it is restarted, holds the values within memory, and increments them as required while it is running. This FAQ in the previous section [[#Where_does_Cumulus_get_its_this_month_and_this_year_rainfall_totals_from.3F]] has a concise description of how Cumulus calculates these figures.
 
*{{Version badge 1}} The rainfall total shown on the ''This month'' screen within the '''View''' menu, is calculated from summing [[dayfile.txt]] totals for a selected month, and so for the default current month will exclude the current meteorological day. The rainfall total for today so far is added for the web tag ''<#rmonth>''. If too small a figure is shown, then the most likely issue is that your dayfile.txt is corrupted and Cumulus cannot read one or more lines. Such corruption might be introduced if you have had a power blip while Cumulus was writing to the file, or if you have viewed the file in a Microsoft tool that might have introduced unwanted characters. Both Cumulus 1 and MX provide editors for dayfile.txt, you should use these as they arrange the fields in columns and you should be able to spot when the fields in one line don't match others. The editors for monthly records (and others) have a facility to read dayfile.txt that can pick up some errors in this file and tell you the line number of the first error.
 
* {{Version badge 1}}The rainfall total shown on the ''This year'' screen within the '''View''' menu, is calculated from summing totals in dayfile.txt for a selected calendar year. For the default current year, it will exclude the current meteorological day. Note that for Cumulus 1 the value labelled "This year" in the rainfall frame may not be the total for this calendar year, as you can choose it to start in any month (see next point).
 
* The rainfall total reported by the ''<#ryear>'' web tag is for the rainfall season to date, it is calculated from taking today's rain and then adding the sum of the totals in dayfile.txt starting with the first (meteorological) day of the month specified in the 'rainfall season' frame on the ''station settings'' screen within the '''Configuration''' menu, until the end of dayfile.txt is reached. So check you have specified the right starting month there before deciding the rainfall total shown is wrong. This is the same figure as is shown on the main screen of Cumulus 1 for "This year" in the rainfall frame.
 
{{Version badge 1}}If you need to, you can specify a year-to-date total to add in for the period up to the point where you started using Cumulus, so that your first year’s total is correct. This is also on the [[Cumulus_Screenshots#Station|Station Configuration screen]]. Make sure you specify the first Cumulus operating year here, otherwise the extra will be added to the annual total for the wrong year! Do note, if your rain season starts in a month other than January, the extra is added throughout the calendar year specified, it is lost when the season swaps to a different calendar year, and if you change the specified year then it will also apply to the next season!
 
See immediately preceding FAQ [[#My_station_invented_some_rain_that_didn.27t_really_occur.2C_and_I_want_to_set_it_to_zero_.28or_some_other_figure.29 |correcting rainfall]] for how to correct errors in total for particular days and how to correct the high extremes for the various periods.
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