Sandaysoft

I have had problems in the past with your software and always had to uninstall and go back to weatherlink being I had no time to really check into what was causing it. But I had installed it again starting Jan 1 2011 and things look good except one problem.

Im using VP2 and seems my wind speeds were off but in your FAQ it gave a fix by adding VP2SleepInterval=0 to the cumulus.ini which I did and that has gotten better but where the problem exists is my wind direction. For example my weather console on jan 26 shows high gust wind direction out of ENE but cumulus shows it East and today my console shows high gust wind out of the NNE but cumulus shows it out of the West with no mention of a NNE wind. Both wind speeds are correct it just wind direction. Can someone help me figure out what the problem is? Its almost a daily thing with the wind direction being wrong. I know my times for logging data seem to be about 10 min off from weatherlink and cumulus but not sure it would cause this problem.

Thanks
Kevin

Where did the data come from - i.e. was Cumulus running at the time of the high gust, or was it subsequently downloaded from the logger?

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Steve
Sanday Weather
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Cumulus is always running.. The only time it gets shut off is if I have to do a restart on my pc. But it was never shut off with the latest high gust.

Then I have no explanation. Cumulus reads the current wind speed and bearing from the same set of data; if the current wind speed is higher than the previous high gust, it records the speed and bearing that it's just read, in the 'Recent Extremes' section. It's hard to see how that could go wrong, aside from it simply being given the wrong bearing. It wouldn't be the first bug in the Davis DLL, by any means.

Does the timestamp of the highest gust as shown by Cumulus match that shown by the console? Are the wind speeds in question quite low?

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Steve
Sanday Weather
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The problem happens with low wind speeds or high. The one day wind was 27mph.

After I added the VP2SleepInterval=0 to the cumulus.ini then the high gust winds match 98% of the time. But what doesn't match is the high gust wind direction. Like I said previously its almost a daily occurrence where the direction is off. The other day console will be WNW but cumulus will just say west.

Does the timestamp of the highest gust as shown by Cumulus match that shown by the console?

I'd do some experimenting to compare the bearing displayed by Cumulus compared to the console but my anemometer is currently broken.

_________________
Steve
Sanday Weather
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No it can be off by 10 min. Very rarely do the timestamp matches

In that case I suspect that one reason is that they are not showing the same event; even though the wind speeds are displayed with the same value, due to rounding they might actually be slightly different, and hence the wind direction may be different.

I've just had a play with my console - I've never used the highs and lows setting before - and as far as I can see the console only ever displays 8 compass positions for highs and lows, so I don't know how yours was displaying WNW while Cumulus was displaying W, or ENE with Cumulus just displaying E. The other way around would make sense.

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Steve
Sanday Weather
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In between my 8 compass readings I have other bearing markings. When I click on highs and lows with wind the arrow lines up between w and nw markings and I opened weatherlink and the winds in the monthly summary for that day do show wnw 30mph and your software shows w @ 30mph that's why I thought there was a problem. Maybe the high/low arrows on my console are off a bit and that's why when I look at it its showing those odd bearings instead of 1 of the 8 readings like it should be.

I don't want to drive you crazy with this problem I have but I just wanted to see if it was my end or something in your software and it seems its on my end. Other then this minor problem I really like the software.

I think it's just that the console and Cumulus are doing different things with the data.

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Steve
Sanday Weather
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Your cumulus software does show all the wind directions from the wnw, nne, wsw, etc like my console. Yesterday Jan 28 my winds were coming out of the ssw which cumulus was showing during the day and that direction happen to have the highest gust of the day at 9mph. My weatherlink software did show high gust 9mph out of the ssw and cumulus even though it showed that direction during the day it save the high gust direction out of the south instead of ssw but the wind speed was correct. It seems cumulus will not save any winds in those directions of nne, wsw, nnw, etc. Also I installed another weather program to see if something was wrong on my side and that program did save the gust out of the ssw. Could there be a bug in cumulus that it wont save to those directions? Has anyone else had any problems like this.

Mine is currently showing 306 degrees NW for today's high gust, and 252 degrees WSW for yesterday's.



What actual bearing is Cumulus showing that corresponds to South? What are the timestamps on the console, and in Cumulus, for the high gust?

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Steve
Sanday Weather
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bearing is 171 for south. For the high gust console shows 14:10 cumulus shows 14:03.

Today current wind bearing 292 for wnw but under recent extreme today has wind bearing 283 wnw. Seems to big of a swing in bearings to come up wnw.

Sorry, I don't understand what you're saying. You mean that a difference of 9 degrees can't still be the same compass position? Each of the 16 positions covers a span of 22.5 degrees (360/16), so 9 degrees is well within that.

W = 270
NNW = 292.5
NW = 315

So everything between about 282 and about 303 maps to NNW.

From the timestamps you've quoted it looks to me like the discrepancy simply comes from the fact that the console is using a different mechanism for deciding that a reading is higher than the previous highest, e.g. 10.2 would be higher than 10.1, but both would be displayed as 10. Do you have Cumulus displaying wind speeds rounded to the nearest mph? If so, in Cumulus 10.2 wouldn't be considered higher than 10.1, so whatever wind direction the 10.1 came from would be recorded as the highest.

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Steve
Sanday Weather
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I was referring to something else with wind direction.



I do not have cumulus round wind speeds to the nearest mph.