I don’t get how weather can be so bad. The different “sources” in the sim (world map, ATIS, ATC and actual sim weather) all differ from each other. Sometimes wildly so. Below is a small example of what I experienced yesterday after SU4. I’m not blaming it on SU4 specifically, as it’s been doing this for me since SU3. Prior to that, weather seemed to be ok-ish and discrepancies between sources were far less severe.
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The world map, ATIS and in sim weather don’t even come close to matching. Same as before the patch, so nothing new. And none of them are even close to real world METAR for the airport I’m currently at.
World map reporting wind coming from 150 / RWY 14 in use.
ATIS reporting wind from 310 and RWY 14 in use (should be RWY 32 from that ATIS report).
Actual wind in sim is wind 210, and RWY 23 is the active for AI planes, which actually matches the sim’s wind conditions.
On the following flight, I flew out of my home airport. Real world weather was partly cloudy with light breeze. Overall, a nice day.
In sim, the weather was severe thunderstorms, rain and 40kt wind. That’s the forecast for today. As I write this at 10:50AM, winds are blowing dark clouds are blowing in, and the forecast calls for severe thunderstorms starting in about 2 hours. It would appear the sim was using today’s weather forecast yesterday evening.
ATIS is never correct, regardless of whether you’re in “current live weather” or “future live weather”. It shouldn’t be relied on for anything.
METAR has and is always current (it’s impossible to get a future METAR report), so temperature, pressure and winds for a METAR reporting airport will usually be accurate. And that seems to be what you’ve just reported.
Clouds and precip come from Meteoblue and every day around 2000z the live weather begins showing the forecast model for the next day around 0800-0900z. So if the clouds and precip for the next day are wildly different than what’s current, you’ll notice it.
For the purposes of this thread, can you let us know approx what real world time you were flying where you encountered the discrepancies? Was it between 2000z and 0800z? If so, you’ve encountered the “future weather” bug.
Yep that’s exactly what it does. Around 20:00z it switches from current weather to what the weather model will be around 12 hours in the future, so around 08:00z the next day. This bug has been present for a long time and is the one that gives me the most headache.
If they could fix it, I strongly believe it would naturally solve a lot of the weather inaccuracies users experience.
@Jummivana tagging you here as well to make sure there is awareness to the developers, given that you are pretty responsive.
As udt4life12 said above, I think fixing this would go a long way towards resolving the bulk of the weather issues people complain about everyday. Not perfect but probably the biggest hammer you guys have. This cant be that difficult of a bug to fix.
It’s quite sad really, as a user that has devoted a lot of my limited free time to not only trying to pinpoint this issue with live weather, but also feedback as much information to the developers in order to try and fix it, I’m starting to feel like the team at ASOBO treat us, their user base with utter contempt. They only seem to chime in when it suits them, which is a real shame because there are so many people, myself included willing to give their time to solve this issue.
The winds don’t seem that far off. One thing to keep in mind also is we don’t know how often METAR data is updated. Maybe the METAR the sim had was for the previous hour?
Another thing to consider is magvar. I use Little Navmap and I’ve noticed a discrepancy with the wind direction being reported in sim compared to what LNM reports on it’s map display. The discrepancy matches the magvar for that area, so I’m not sure if either FS or LNM is using true direction or magnetic direction. I haven’t looked into it all that much tbh.
Yep. I would assume they are updated within the weather model cycles, and that would be 1 hour, whereas irl METAR reports are updated twice every hour (and not on the hour, here in Germany it is 20/50 minutes past the full hour). So I would naturally expect some differences, but you would encounter those irl also, so nothing I would urge to be corrected.
As information from official side are scarce (to say the least), there’s still the presumption that time zones may play a role in these issues. Still trying to help identifying the cause, here’s my observation from today:
I flew to EDDH and was on downwind to Rwy23 at around 1530Z today. Here’s what the cloud situation looked like. As downwind heading is approx. 50 degrees, the screenshot shows the clouds to the north-northwest.
On the opposite side (right side in flight direction) there was a scattered cloud coverage with a lot of sun.
Now here’s the rain radar from meteoblue at approx. 1530Z:
I have drawn the aircraft (yes, I know ! ) for better orientation.
Here are my thoughts:
I believe the clouds seen in the screenshot belong to the rain area seen on the Meteoblue waether radar. And here’s the deal: In real life and according to the Meteoblue weather radar those conditions are to be expected at least 1 hour later at EDDH. My guess is the weather model injection is configured for my time zone as being UTC +1h, whereas my computer is set to UTC +2h, as we currently have daylight savings time. That would explain the difference in weather depiction and would be a hint that timezones are involved, if not a cause for the issue.
Just a thought - but I’m going to add this to my Zendesk report. (and hope I didn’t make a logical error - those timezones are confusing for sure)
There is far more fact than opinion to that comment.
I too have put games/sims aside for months if not over a year in hopes of returning to find many things fixed.
Unfortunately it would appear the developers behind MSFS love to use the word “improved” a lot and provide no insight on the changes made in their patch notes.
Many things labeled “improved” in patch notes had negative feedback and the improvement was blamed for making something worse or creating a bug after installing the update.
TLDR:
I would not be surprised if the same LIVE Weather issues are still present 6-12 months from now, with only a few mentions of “Improved LIVE Weather” in patch notes leading up to then.
If that’s the case, I wonder why the live weather system would need any input whatsoever about an end user’s system time.
I would think the system would provide the weather for the correct forecast hour using Zulu time within their own servers, which is the same for everyone no matter whether they’re in Daylight savings or not.
Although the latest Sim Update fixed the Live Weather, there is still a daily bug when flying at a time range between 20-08 UTC. The in-sim Live Weather uses clouds and precipitation data from the Meteoblue weather forecast model at that time range instead of the current weather situation. This is the reason if you have experienced “wrong weather”. Wind, temperature, and pressure at the airports seem to be correct though because they are injected from METAR. The workaround for this is to use the free Live METAR add-on when flying at 20-08 UTC until Asobo fixes this.
Weather, including new cloud types and historical weather, was discussed during today’s Q&A session but the team completely avoided anything related to Real Weather not synching properly despite numerous comments on that subject posted during the session.
Actually they said something. It wasn’t much, but they are aware of the issue and are working on the solution. So at least they know what’s happening.
Also @anon62478633, that looks like a good workaround while Asobo is working on the solution. Using Unreal Weather for takeoff and landings and then switching to live weather for correct winds and temperatures aloft. I’ll definitely try that.
Yeah, it seems to be bang on right now, I’ve just tested it on three different airports with different weather conditions. Even the world map doesn’t show future weather loaded.
) for better orientation.