The problem with what you are saying is that it ignores my many many years of sitting outside watching storms come up…and clouds tend to blow along in the direction the wind is blowing…its what clouds do – the way they behave if you will.
So here’s the surface situation at 1630 on 5/3:
You can see the front positioned to the south of PGD.
Here are the forecast winds at the same time, first at 1000’ MSL:
And at 6000’ MSL:
As you can see, the winds between those alatitudes are diametrically opposed. The PBL is obviously happening somewhere in between (along with a front that likely has some slope to it, adding to the effect).
Here’s a model forecast sounding for the same time, note the winds on the right scale, which I circled in yellow. You can see the opposition.
This is why when people post static screenshots of either sim, it doesn’t… can’t paint the complete picture.
3 Likes
That’s anecdotal, though. The physics of clouds are an enormous field of study. That said, it’s often the case that there aren’t any clouds below the PBL, and in many cases you may be seeing more of a unitary parcel, with clouds moving relatively the same direction.
But in many cases clouds at 6000’ are often doing something different than those at 18,000 or 30,000’.
Get a good, surface-based supercell and you have them going all sorts of directions. In fact, that ingredient (helicity) is pretty much necessary for supercellular development. Other types of shear (speed and/or directional) are necessary for any sustained or severe convection.
Here’s a prime example out of Mojave, CA right now. Camera is pointed SSW. You can see a low layer moving right to left (eastward), while an mid layer is moving away from the camera, mostly southward.
What’s neat is we can correlate it to the current modeled skew-t - I marked on the right side about where the layer splits.
Here’s an even longer, more dramatic one out of Minden, NV, looking west toward the Sierra Escarpment on the east side of Lake Tahoe.
This one is exacerbated by orographic effects. But what you’re not seeing directly (but you can see shadows on the mid layer) is an upper layer that’s heading west-southwestbound, away from the camera, above the overcast mid layer.
Clouds are frikkin amazing and we should be encouraging devs to do them right, better. But you can see the complexity involved and my caution is we don’t set them up to make it worse driving our demands through an incomplete lens. And of course, balancing that with not letting perfect be the enemy of good, either. There is some definite low-hanging fruit that would vastly improve the experience.
2 Likes
It’s interesting to see as I wonder what wind levels each sim is using to base cloud movement on. I can say that I am between KSPG and KPGD and the clouds were moving out of the Northeast, matching the 1000’ wind speed chart. I verified it on one of my cameras. Looking at these pics again, I actually cannot tell the true direction the clouds were moving for each sim. I will say one thing, the XP depiction is spot-on to what it looked like that day in the late morning, early afternoon. It was not that bright hazy white look that MSFS is depicting….
2 Likes
More research is definitely needed. I know that the layer modeling has changed in the past. I’m not sure if the present-state is modeled well as such. One really has to do timelapses and compare them with as many observations and model runs as possible to get the complete picture.
I’ve done quite a bit of it, but it’s been a few years since I’ve really dug deep, mostly because it doesn’t seem to be changing, and devs really don’t acknowledge what’s going on under the hood, or what’s been changed, anyway, so it gets to be a little futile chasing an unknown target.
1 Like
When it does it well, it really does.
This is stormy weather, found while testing something else.
SAZM 062000Z 10018G31KT 5000 -TSRA FEW015 OVC035 FEW045CB 15/15 Q1005 RMK PP///
But, truth be told it looks a lot better with Rex Atmos Core running.
1 Like
Evenings are usually reproduced the best in the sim. This moment of blue hour can be breathtaking. Rex atmos core is really helpful and makes the picture looks even more real. I wish I had discovered Rex earlier. The best spent 15$.
I usually fly GA so I just look at the windsock and go. I’ve never compared real weather with the weather in sim. I did it today for the first time. The reason I dit it, was rain approaching my village. Picture worth million words. Look at this beautiful clouds formations.
Unfortunately in sim I found only this generic puffy clouds which makes me sick. No approaching front, no high clouds layer, nothing… just puffs here and there.
There are two problems with weather system in MSFS. First one is real weather representation. I am not the specialist so I don’t want to speak about details which was talked here a lot before. Simplifying, sim probably can’t translate the data which it gets to the visual language we see. It can’t do this because there is not enough elements (cloud types) to build convincing image. The second problemis visual. It’s impossible to make every type of weather of some variation od cumulus. The result is that what we see in the simulation has little to do with reality. Yesterday I flew around south Texas. I saw some strange streaks as if painted by a child having his first contact with Photoshop.
I don’t know why it is working like that. Rex atmos core can make pretty good cirrus layer. It uses the same engine so I don’t know why sim itself can’t do this. I don’t know why it can’t reproduce atmosphere, so it feels like flying over big diorama, not a real world. The firs one is oversaturated and visibility is almost limitless (8NM according to metar 
)
…and the same with haze. IMO more convincing.
8 Likes
Back in MSFS 2020 the clouds worked fine up until a certain sim update. Clouds would disappear and become almost transparent as you flew through them. Then re-appear as you passed them. This is not life-like at all.
Just because some users have dinosaur machines but have their settings all maxed out and start complaining their clouds are grainy, or the clouds are really messing up their machine, PLEASE DO NOT ADJUST THE CLOUDS TO FIT THEIR NEEDS. It was really disappointing to have to purchase a 3rd party software just to get the clouds to look like you were actually flying through them.
MSFS 2024, it currently looks like you fly through or past clouds. Some users purchased or built machines to make this happen without a problem. PLEASE DO NOT DOWNGRADE this performance just to satisfy needs again.
Thank you
8 Likes
I have to admit something: when you add Rex Atmos with the right settings and a Reshade preset, you can still get a slightly more realistic feel. So yeah, it’s definitely not X-Plane’s lighting. The clouds are sometimes really gross, like popcorn. But there’s one pretty cool thing: the haze effect, which had completely disappeared, is back—it’s still the same no matter the weather, but it’s closer to reality because infinite visibility just doesn’t exist.
4 Likes