I was wondering if anyone else has had this problem recently and what I can check to try and resolve it.
Every time it rains, whatever the rain total is at 11:59pm is carried over and at 1am the next day, the rate spikes to the total. This results in rainfall incorrectly being recorded, and does not match my Davis reporting.
Attached is my Wunderground graph illustrating the issue (I reset the total at 6am). I am fairly new to Weather Display so I can’t confirm for how long this has been occurring (or if was happening in previous builds).
I’ve checked all the times and settings related to time that I can see and I am truly stumped. This also requires me to go in and manually delete the daily rainfall and adjust the monthly and yearly totals every rain event.
Another interesting data point that I just noticed with today’s rainfall…my Davis console is showing 0.01" of rain today, while WD is reporting 0.02". I’m not sure if it is related, but a discrepancy nonetheless.
Edit: I went into the station setup settings and ticked to use the console rain rate and totals. It immediately changed today’s rainfall to 0.01". I’ll let these settings run for a while to see if it corrects the other issue.
Quick update: I received 0.01†of rain yesterday, and after switching to use the console rain rate and totals, I’m still seeing yesterday’s rainfall being reported as the rain rate until 1am today.
The odd thing is, the rain rate prior to midnight was 0.00. It’s like for some reason, at midnight, WD starts reporting yesterday’s total rainfall as the rain rate for an hour. At least with using the console totals, it did not get counted as rainfall today. See attached.
Not sure why WD is picking up data for rain rate. With Brian not available the best idea I can come up with is to try the 2wd.txt troubleshooting step to prove or disprove that it’s a misconfigured setting in WD.
The next time you expect rain try using the 2wd.txt to create a minimal WD setup, just enough to get data from the VP2. This should rule out any left over settings from previous installs or mis-configured entries in WD.
So the idea is to run both my existing and this second instance at the same time? If the second instance shows the correct behavior, would I be able to switch over to that as the “primary” version and preserve my data and settings?
By placing the 2wd.txt file when you start up WD it will create a 2nd set of files for recording data. I don’t think running 2 instances of WD would be a good idea. The idea here is just to rule out a misconfiguration setting in WD. When testing is completed you remove the 2wd.txt file and when you start up WD it will return to using your normal files again.
Ok, I see. I was confused because the instructions in that post say to create a new directory, and download and install into that to run a second instance.
Are you saying I should close out WD, create the 2wd.txt file in my existing directory, and then restart it?
I don’t know why you’re seeing the data resetting at 1am but I wonder if the odd rain rate vs rain total is due to the “Don’t count the first rain bucket tip of the day” setting. That might show a value for rain rate but not increment the total. Sorry I don’t run the Windows version so I don’t know what the setting is actually called, but it’s the one to avoid overnight dew condensing on the rain gauge from being counted as rain.
That is correct. When you re-start WD it will detect that file and auto create a 2nd set of files for recording data. It’s been a long time since I did this procedure, but from what I remember files will created with the “2” added, ie. WDISPLAY.INI would be WDISPLAY2.INI.
Once testing is completed you shutdown WD, delete the 2wd.txt file, then re-start WD and you’re back to normal.
Thanks for this. I double checked, and I don’t have that setting ticked. I think there is some bug or misconfiguration, as NorCal Dan suspects, since the rain rate is 0 at 23:59, but jumps up to match the previous day’s rainfall total at 00:00. It then drops back to 0 at 01:00, but with full hour at that rate, it was counting it as new rain.
Thank you so much for walking me through this. I have set this up, and configured it with minimal changes (got my website updating and WUnderground flowing) and will run it today and tomorrow since there is a slight chance of rain in the forecast, in hopes of seeing a difference.
I am happy to report that the rainfall data seems to be correct using the fresh configuration. Although I am having other new issues with it. For some reason “Storm rain” isn’t updating in testtags.php and I have to launch the WUrapidfire.exe executable to get WU rapid fire to start, but at least I’m not seeing false rainfall!!
So it definitely seems to be a misconfiguration in my initial install that is causing my rain issues.
Should I try reconfiguring? I’m not sure what the next step should be.
Now that you know where the problem is then I would shutdown WD, remove the 2wd.txt file, then restart WD. That will return you to your original setup and data files.
You then need to figure out what is misconfigured in your setup. WD has evolved over the years as Brian continued to add suggestions and new stations to the code along with debugging the code and in some cases work-arounds to fix problems that arose. It is very easy for a new user to WD to inadvertently make a change they shouldn’t have that doesn’t show up right away.
You could wipe out all settings in WD (there’s an FAQ on that) and start from scratch, but, you could make the same mistake again. Another option is to load your config file into a text editor and methodically go line by line to find the problem, but if you don’t know what you’re looking at or for then this could be a miss as well. There is a 3rd option, that I will offer, to run your ini and setup file through my DIFF program to compare them looking for an discrepancies. Follow this FAQ http://discourse.weather-watch.com/t/12684 but instead of emailing Brian (who is currently unavailable) you would send them to my email. PM me if you have questions.
I did try a cursory look at a diff between the two files and you are correct, with my eyes, I don’t see any differences that would be affecting the rainfall reporting.
I am half tempted to just start fresh. From what I was able to find (http://discourse.weather-watch.com/p/374514), it looks like I should be able to just delete (i’ll rename it to save it just in case) the config file and it will start up just as it did with the 2wd.txt file in place. That post is about 11 years old though, so if that has changed, I didn’t see it.
Well, after deleting the 2wd.txt file and switching back to my original config yesterday, I decided to try unticking the options to use the console rain rates and totals just to see if maybe that would update the config file and perhaps clear the issue.
After doing so, I received more rain yesterday and the WD total matched the console total! And more importantly, no rainfall or rain rate was logged for today!
Fingers crossed, but I may have corrected the issue!
