Charts

Under construction

Introduction

One of the most important modules of CumulusUtils is the charting module as it gives insight in in your weather data. A picture says more than a thousand words. The charting is subdivided in four sections: Rain charts, Temperature charts, Solar charts and Wind charts.

And if you run the Website Generator, the Home page shows the charts similar (almost equal) to the charts which default to the CumulusMX Recent Charts page and CumulusMX Historic Charts page. From end of 2020 CumulusUtils begins to deviate in charting approach from CumulusMX with respect to those default charts.

This page describes only the common features and requirements, the graphs themselves are discussed on their own page.

The charts are created using HighCharts using their non-commercial license. If you want to use the charts or the Website Generator of CumulusUtils, please make yourself acquainted with this license.

Operation

This module is included in the website. When needed as a single output the following command is given:

  utils/bin/cumulusutils.exe graphs

The Home page charts of the website will be described there.

Output

The output are the files: graphstemp.txt, graphsrain.txt, graphswind.txt and graphssolar.txt.

These files contain both the menu code in javascript (each file has its own selection menu), the Highcharts code in javascript for the charts and the data.

Inifile parameters

The charting module is second in place of modules with the most parameters (the Website Generator being first) and also require more explanation. Note that the charts on the Home page of the Website have their own explicit colour specifications.

All parameters belong to the section [graphs]:

   [Graphs]

All charts can be individually selected to be present or not. If the value of the following parameters is false the chart and its data will be generated to the output, but the menu choice will not be present so the user can't select.

Rain graphs:

   DailyRain=true
   MonthlyRain=true
   YearRainstats=true
   YearMonthRainstats=true

Temperature charts:

   MonthlyTemp=true
   YearTempstats=true
   YearMonthTempstats=true
   WarmerDays=true
   HeatMap=true

Wind charts:

   WindRose=true
   Windrun=true

Solar charts:

   SolarHours=true
   SolarEnergy=true
   SolarHoursYearMonth=true
   SolarEnergyYearMonth=true

Miscellaneous charts:

   DailyEVT=true
   MonthlyEVT=true
   AverageClash=true

Chart parameters:

   UseHighchartsBoostModule=true | false
   UseNormalTempReference=both | Normal | StationAverage    (default = Normal)
   UseNormalRainReference=both | Normal | StationAverage    (default = Normal)
   MaxNrOfSeriesVisibileInGraph=3                           (default = 2)
   PeriodMovingAverage=365                                  (default = 180)
   WindRoseNrOfWindforceClasses=6                           (default = 6)
   WindRoseMaxWindSpeed=60                                  (default = 60)
   WindRoseInversed=false | true                            (default = false)
   WindrunClassWidth=75                                     (default = 75)
   HeatmapNumberOfYearsPerPage=10                            (default = 10)

Map Colour parameters (see Charts behaviour)

   GraphColors=
   ;GraphColors=['#058DC7', '#50B432', '#ED561B', '#DDDF00', '#24CBE5', '#64E572', '#FF9655', '#FFF263', '#6AF9C4']
   WindRoseColors=
   ;WindRoseColors=['lightgrey', 'green', 'blue', 'yellow', 'orange', 'red', 'deeppink', 'purple', 'black']

Inner working

Algorithmic

The output files are HTML UTF8 format. All javascript is included in <script> tags so these are not pure javascript libraries. For each output file the javascript menu is written. When finished the Highcharts lib includes are written IF the modules are not meant to be used in the CumulusUtils Website Generator.

When menu and includes are ready all required graphs are generated together with their data. Code generation and data selection is a one pass process.