Precipitation changes to zero for previous day - Acurite PWS software reporting issue

Current day precipitation updates from pws as expected


and from midnight to 12:15am the past daily precipitation shows up

but then at 12:16am the previous day precipitation changes to zero

Any ides on what might be causing this?
(Gen 3 flex daily)

@killowhat

Thanks for reporting this. We had another customer report something similar. It’s actually an issue with the Acurite software sending data to WU.

Here is the response we received from IBM/WU

Thank you for the information and I completely understand your (and your customers) frustration as I would have the same!

Apparently, the issue is not with our WeatherUnderground system or the methodology of the observations into a daily summary. The issue resides in the AcuRite’s system. AcuRite is the vendor (weather station) that is collecting the data and sending it to us. It appears the way that some stations are recording the data and sending are not correctly sending the summary data.

We are working with the weather station company requesting they update their software to resolve this issue.

Here is the data we receive for that station:

    {
        "stationID": "KNENELSO3",
        "tz": "America/Chicago",
        "obsTimeUtc": "2018-06-21T04:59:54Z",
        "obsTimeLocal": "2018-06-20 23:59:54",
        "epoch": 1529557194,
        "lat": 40.20190811,
        "lon": -98.07097626,
        "solarRadiationHigh": null,
        "uvHigh": null,
        "winddirAvg": 276,
        "humidityHigh": 97,
        "humidityLow": 55,
        "humidityAvg": 83,
        "metric": {
            "tempHigh": 28,
            "tempLow": 16,
            "tempAvg": 20,
            "windspeedHigh": 24,
            "windspeedLow": 0,
            "windspeedAvg": 4,
            "windgustHigh": 24,
            "windgustLow": 0,
            "windgustAvg": 6,
            "dewptHigh": 21,
            "dewptLow": 13,
            "dewptAvg": 17,
            "windchillHigh": 30,
            "windchillLow": 16,
            "windchillAvg": 22,
            "heatindexHigh": 29,
            "heatindexLow": 14,
            "heatindexAvg": 20,
            "pressureMax": 1015.58,
            "pressureMin": 1011.18,
            "pressureTrend": 0.03,
            "precipRate": null,
            "precipTotal": 0
        }
    },

I looked and unfortunately it is an acurite station.

I will let you know as soon as this is resolved, is there another station you can use in the meantime?

Screenshot%20from%202018-06-21%2020-54-14

Thank you for the quick response. I will use the next closest pws 12 miles away until Acurite corrects their software :wink: or purchase a new pws.

I hope it’s not a big effort on their side. I’m assuming we have a lot of customers with Acurite stations. If it takes too long there might be some modifications we can do to access the data differently but I think that would take a significant amount of work.

:cheers:

:+1:

I have same issue. Data is recorded the day is raining and reset to zero the next day. I tried couple different weather stations around me and same thing happens. Support staff is blaming weather station and recommended using Weather Network and said they will try to fix the problem and they will get back with me. Did not happened, problem still there. Problem with weather network is that it does not show accurate precipitation for my area. My question is, when rain data is recorded for that day, why it is not locked? Can someone explain what this mean -Weather Intelligence™ Plus pinpoints weather within a 36 foot radius, then adjusts schedules accordingly.

@ms34 @killowhat I think I’ve figured out a temporary workaround until Acurite/IBM WU can fix the software issue they are having. I hope to roll this out over the weekend.

It’s difficult to explain how our system works. Recorded precipitation for today is a “current” observation. We don’t persist that data for a couple days since it changes. At that time we have to use different data based on historical observations. In this limited case with Acurite stations and WU they are not reporting any precipitation. Like stated above I think I can implement a workaround.

Hope this helps.

:cheers:

:+1:

Thank you. Yes that would be very helpful.

@ms34 @killowhat

The engineering team finished and deployed this workaround for missing Acurite IBM WU to production. Note that any data > 2 days old is persisted so will not be corrected. Please let me know if you are still experiencing any missing precipitation data.

:cheers:

1 Like

Thank you for this workaround!

Thank you.

I noticed Rachio is showing yesterday’s precipitation as zero when it was 0.06". Could this have something to do with the algorithm when observed precipitation is less than the forecasted amount, which I believe was 0.22" for yesterday?

@killowhat

We forwarded this information to WU. Even using our workaround (the hourly data sent from your station instead of a daily summary) for some reason we don’t get precipitation for 6/24. We did however receive hourly precipitation data for 6/23 which is odd.

They are actively looking into this issue.

:cheers:

FYI, the precipitation data on 6/30 (0.58") & 7/1 (0.22") reset to zero & 0.04 after midnight.

2 posts were split to a new topic: WI Plus Zero Precipitation Recorded

Precipitation is still resetting to zero after midnight.

@killowhat It looks like IBM/Acurite changed some data (assumption we were making) which impacts our “workaround” until they fix the main issue. I’m going to “patch” this again tonight and it should start retrieving precipitation data again until they fix the main issue. I’ll reach out to them for a timeframe on the real fix.

:cheers:

@killowhat Patch was released. Your graph looks much better for yesterday (we persist data more than 2 days old and can’t retro fix that).

:cheers:

1 Like

Thank you