Please take a look at the new beta version of WXSIM! It has an auto run feature, plus a plain text forecast output. If you are a registered user (or actually even if you’ve already downloaded the demo but haven’t registered) you can try this out. I haven’t yet updated the user’s manual or all the help, but there’s some explanation in the readmebeta.txt file. Just go to www.wxsim.com and go to the downloads page to get the installer wxsimbeta.txt, which overwrites wxsim.exe, wxsimate.exe, and help2.txt in previously installed versions.
I’ll be interested to hear your feedback!
(I’ll be out of town until Sunday evening, so I won’t be posting until then)
Plain text forecast output,is excellent {would it be possible to have the dates at the side of days}
Optional global warming, I have used this setting, in my last forecast run
and they seem to be more accurate, than the previous version
Tom I like the new beta. I have been playing with it a bit and the forecasts so far look quite good when compared with our Met Office stuff.
I really like the new text format forecast which is ideal for my website. I concur about the dates comments, would make life easier. I guess you would need to save the dates in the format specified by the user in wxsim so as to cater for the USA and others on the date order.
Stuart
Edit: On reflection I dont think Today & Tonight are a good idea. I think it is always better to have the day name for each day (with date) then if this gets semi-automated and something goes awry it will be obvious which days are being forecast. I would like to parse this data to align the columns on my website, maybe insert into a table, so can we keep some kind of delimeter as we have at present with the full stop (period) between each item. I dont mind what the delimter is just that it is always the same.
The automated version seems to be giving me more accurate forecasts that I was getting in manual mode. I suspect it is much better at selecting the advection options, especially which curve to use.
Two things to note though. WxSimate did have trouble one time getting local data from WD because WD was using the logs. Perhaps a retry after a few seconds? Also, Wret.exe is having trouble with your new archive file naming convention which I suspect is too many letters.
Thanks for a great product and we look forward to hearing from you when you return. - Jim
Hi Tom,
The auto beta works great. Still gives the best forcast for this area. Better than NWS or intellacast, even beats Weather underground. I think that you are on the right track.
Chuck
Jim - that problem when WD was using the logs … what kind of error resulted? I’m actually not using WD at home because my weather station is at school, and it quit working recently! That’s a hard one to catch. Was it some kind of “access denied because the file is already in use error”? What did WXSIMATE do after that? Just sit there? Maybe I can “fake” the situation by having some other program write stuff to the log file?? Did it just happen once? Out of how many uses? Anybody else seen that?
Hopefully I can weed out these bugs quickly. I do have a few more features I want to work on.
Does anyone know exactl how often and when WD accesses the log files? Once a minute? Does this happen promptly at the start of the minute? Maybe Brian could answer that?
Tom WD accesses the log files every minute. I must say I have never had a problem with WXSimate not being able to access my log files. I dont know if it makes a difference but WD runs on a different PC to WXSim(ate) and therefore accesses the log files on a networked hard drive.
I probably made an error in my earlier post when I said there was a problem getting to the WD log files. I can’t be sure that I read those error messages all that closely.
I’ve attached the error message that I received yesterday. The message remains until I press continue, then the program proceeds. I believe WxSimate ran each hour from 8:00 am until this happened at 3:00 pm. I had WxSim beginning 6 minutes after WxSimate and will increase that to 10 minutes and I think all will be fine. Sorry. - Jim
I’ve gotten that same, well almost the same, mine is for another program. I don’t remember if it was before I installed WXSIM or not. Maybe a .NET problem and not the programs?
In fact I’m running the same set-up as you, laptop reading WD data over wireless LAN. I’ll have to pay more attention if it happens again.
This morning I was observing the forecast running in automatic mode and got the error message again. WxSim continued to run in spite of the message box being there and completed the forecast. Now I suspect that when I was running hourly unattended forecasts, there’s a good possibility that the message popped up on one of the earlier runs and not necessarily on the last as I assumed. Apparently harmless at this point.
Would it be possible to have WinSim & WinSimate optionally start up in auto run mode? It could even be a command line switch such as “winsim.exe -auto”. That would allow us to get it back online after a power outage in the same manner as we handle WD. Thanks. - Jim