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Fire Family Plus imports and field-sample errors stripped data silently; users advised to check timestamps and longitudes
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Summary
Participants were warned that Fire Family Plus can drop records when importing fw21 files (timestamps are interpreted in UTC) and that a double-database produced erroneous field-sample entries; developers recommend checks for negative longitudes and manual cleanup where cross-site samples occurred.
Office-hours participants heard two related warnings affecting data imports and field samples. First, the moderator explained that while the fw21 format and CSV are structurally interchangeable, Fire Family Plus imports fw21 timestamps in UTC and will quietly drop records it deems infeasible — examples cited included temperatures above 145°F, relative humidity over 100% or extreme hourly precipitation — which can lead to entire hours being removed from an imported dataset without explicit notification.
"It will literally delete entire rows of data without you knowing it," the moderator said, urging users who convert between CSV and fw21 to check for missing hours after import and to be aware that Fire Family Plus may remove records it considers infeasible.
Second, participants described field-sample data corruption from a double-database issue: samples from one site were shown on different sites (for example, Colorado samples appearing on a Minnesota site). Speaker 3 advised that the practical fix is to delete the erroneous archived record, save subsamples, and re-enter correct subsample assignments; the system retains an audit trail but cleanup is largely manual and must be done case-by-case.
Moderator also reminded users that adding a site requires longitude entered as a negative value for continental U.S. locations; missing the negative caused sites to appear in incorrect global coordinates and blocked saves. Developers said a fix prepopulates the negative longitude for new sites to reduce errors.
Users were advised to report import anomalies and field-sample inconsistencies so those cases can be cleaned or included in a batch fix where possible.
