Just letting you know I’m planning another release, maybe in the next 2-3 days. I’ve been going through WXSIMATE, testing links and finding what’s outdated (basically it’s the FTP things and data from albany.edu) and pruning these out to avoid errors from unresponsive sites. I’ve also cleaned up the interface a bit.
Right now, my latest WXSIM is 2015 Build 2.1. It’s already up at
It skips over the albany.edu and FTP URL options as these have apparently become obsolete. That’s the main change, other than cleaning up the interface just a bit.
If it’s not too difficult, would it be possible to eliminate all the display boxes and progress bars that come up when both WxSim and WRET are run? Maybe just a single progress bar in both programs would suffice. I would think eliminating all these “screen writes” would also shorten the time it takes for both these programs to run.
My WxSim run takes over 6 minutes with my PC running at 100%. I have FX-4100 Quad-Core processor with 16GB memory. I run Virtual VP, VWS, Cumulus, Lightning 2000, WebcamXP with 4 cameras, 2 instances of IPTimeLapse, and 2 instances of GRLevel3. My machine is pretty full.
I’ve got WxSim setup now to only display the WxSim overall progress bar along with the periodic progress bars that popup throughout the run. I’d really prefer seeing WRET not display all the data it attempts to show until is runs out of buffer then shows Not Responding until it’s finished. I think simply showing a progress bar would really help speed that program up.
I would have expected it to be faster than that, I have an i5 3470s / 16gb / 3 SSD running Cumulus / WXSIM and other weather related software, PV / power monitoring and my security software recording three HD cams 24 / 7.
May be this should / could be another thread - how long does your take?
Thanks for the suggestions, especially the idea of not displaying wret.exe’s output during its analysis run. I’ve sometimes seen it get really busy and even look frozen for a couple minutes, if it’s doing a really big job. So, I just did an experiment in the development environment. I ran a set of data where it shows the text, and that run took 58 seconds. I then changed the code to have it skip over the text output (so it didn’t print any results to the screen). This saved a bit of time, but not much - it still took 54 seconds. In other words, the large majority of the processing is the actual number crunching and file reading, with only a very small fraction being due to trying to display the results. It was a really good suggestion, but the difference isn’t enough right now to warrant a change.
Many factors affect the run time for the program. The biggest are the settings of output interval (I think 30 minutes is best) and iterations per interval (I like either 3 or 6). If the output interval is shorter, and/or the iterations per interval are bigger, this slows the program down. Also, if you make the wind shift tolerance much less than the 40 degrees or so I usually set it as default, the wind will shift perhaps every three hours fo forecast time, and slow things down. Finally, using soil calculations slows it some.
I run the program on a very old computer (when XP was brand new, I think), and my 7 day run takes anywhere from 4 to 8 minutes. I think modern computers with similar settings usually take a minute or maybe two, though this can depend a lot on the number of wind shifts.
Oh, about the ‘FOUS data over 24 hours old’ message, are you meaning to import it in WXSIM (it’s just for North America, mainly the U.S.), and are you downloading it in WXSIMATE?
It sounds like possibly you put it in a folder by itself (?). You would want to download it and use it to overwrite the existing one. The normal upgrade package will take care of that sort of thing anyway.
The first time I ran this version, I got the ‘FOUS too old’ message, but have not seen it since.
I have two questions, these did not start with this version:
On my data entry form, should there be anything in the boxes to the right of the green Found NAM FOUS text? I do have it checked in WXSIMATE (See Attached)
Why do I always see the message, ‘difficulty reconciling READY or GFS relative humidities with total cloud cover’, when I manually import data?
Yet another senior moment rules!, you are quite right I didn’t put in wxsim directory (I should have realized when it didn’t offer me the option), working just fine now
Firstly and most importantly: Happy New Year to come. May it be a good one (better than last!) Particular thanks to Tom for this amazing program, and his continued passion for refining and supporting it.
I downloaded the new wxsimate.exe and put it in each of my two directories that have WXSIM in (two different sites.) But my system won’t run either. It hangs; nothing appears to happen except that Windows Explorer hangs. Attempts to delete wxsimate.exe don’t work; neither does attempting to end the processes that are using it. I tried rebooting to no avail. Eventually I told my PC to delete it on restart and reinstated the old versions, and phew, it’s working again. (Guess that’s what backups are for!)
In case it is of use, here’s the process IDs.
Round here, we’ve had truly exceptional weather, yet again. The amount of rain, and the misery it has caused, has been simply phenomenal. December has broken UK records for rainfall and for temperature. The next town down the river has had its bridge totally washed away, and the next town up river has major structural problems with its bridge, which is closed but still moving and carries water, gas, electric and phone cables; and the bridge in our town was blocked by a landslide.
I sadly have no doubt that climate change is occurring, with some degree of anthropogenic forcing, and that people are suffering and dying as a result. I escaped the worst of this - all it caused was inconvenience and worry; I wasn’t able to go out on boxing day or my birthday as we’d planned, and I was concerned our electricity would (will!) go - but others are without power, water, sewage, telephone or other basics, and are living in cold houses where sewage has soaked into their walls. God be with them.
Doug, I’m wondering if something went wrong with trying to download those .exe’s directly. Now they are packed in the installers, so maybe that will work.
The ‘difficulty reconciling’ cloud cover and humidities messages is not really a problem (other than perhaps being annoying). I don’t know why you get it so frequently (it’s somewhat rare here).
Let me know how it goes, and Happy New Year!
Thanks to everybody for yuor support of my programs!
At this Point i’d like to say thank Tom and Sam.
Thank you for your Support and your Time.
Always friendly and helpful, which is not self-evident at this time.
Thank you and have a good Time and all the Users too here in the Forum.
And a peaceful 2016!!
