Month.ini: Difference between revisions

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.

There was no monthly functionality in Cumulus. This monthly log ini file did not exist.

Month.ini is one of the files that is included in the back up made each time there is a roll-over at the end of a meteorological day. All the files stored reflect the position as the day ended, not always the position as the new day starts. For example, Cumulus stores the '''Month.ini''' for the month just finishing when it does end of month roll-over.

Month.ini contains the highest daily value for certain derivatives in the month, those daily values are supposed to be accumulated over a meteorological day, so the accumulation resets at rollover time. Due to a programming bug, some were reset at midnight irrespective of actual rollover time.  Prior to build 1048 this meant that for those using 9am/10am rollover, wind run accumulated between midnight and rollover was assigned to the following day.  Equally, some values where peaks at a particular time were tracked in this file, the date logged was adjusted to the correct calendar day, but between midnight and rollover it should be assigned to meteorological date (the previous calendar date) to ensure peaks were not assigned to wrong month.  The full description of bugs was not recorded as it was assumed everyone updated to fixed build, and people did not care about past records (Cumulus 1 at this stage discarded records for past months).  It was subsequently discovered that the bugs were not fixed completely in build 1048!

Before to the release of build 1053,  

#Cumulus created a new meteorological month early, and updated the month.ini as if it had started at midnight, losing everything in the month.ini for the previous month, and corrupting the month.ini for the meteorological month that correctly starts only after rollover.

On the end of month roll-over back-up folder, Cumulus stores the '''month.ini''' after it has been initialised for the new month. No copy is retained of the month.ini at the end of the month.

MX uses the same '''month.ini''' file to record extreme records for current month. At start of each meteorological day, MX backs up the current file as in its [[Data folder|/data]], so when the month changes, this backs up the (empty) file for new month. The content is essentially same as other flavours except that when new extremes occur the date format used has year first as shown in example in table below. 3.6.x releases of MX add Canadian Humidity Index and Feels Like Temperatures to what is stored.  

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.

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.

For full details see [[Correcting Extremes]] page.