Official and reliable weather stations are scarce, and most of the weather station measurement data is useful only for a radius of 3 to 12 km surrounding the station. This means that less than 1% of the worlds surface is covered by measured data. For the atmosphere, much less measurement data exists. Since weather stations are located unevenly on land surfaces, you will find just a few places with weather stations in the vicinity. In most areas, stations are widely spaced and there are many places (especially in South America / Africa / Asia / unpopulated areas) where you will not find any weather station in the vicinity. meteoblue weather simulations, however, cover the whole Earth surface, including the sea and mountainous areas. Therefore, meteoblue can offer forecast and historical data for any place in the world, including the atmosphere above us.
Applications for simulation vs. measurement data
meteoblue can replace measurements in most areas. A simulation will be more precise for a given place than measurements taken 20 or more km away (in mountain areas, the simulation is already more accurate than a measurement at a distance of 3 - 10 km away). In places with very high need for reliability, such as airports, city centres, building management, irrigation systems, renewable energy production sites, high traffic roads and some others, the additional precision offered by measurements justify the (substantially) higher cost.
Interesting read and also on those pictures you show we can see that those weather station dots also messes with the complete picture of the weather simulation. That is how they integrated the METAR in the sim now with bubbles around the airports. The circles around the green dot is the fog-circles and the green dots is the bubble around the airport that removes clouds or rain to make the visibility correct.
I don’t like that. I wish i could remove those dots of weather and have a complete global simulated weather as i had before su7.
I think I would also like to see a 100% simulated weather system in the sim, get rid of real-world data completely (or at least give the option to switch between purely simulated and real-world), since I seriously don’t care one bit if the weather outside my window matches what I see in FS2020, and I’m sick and tired of seeing people in the community whine about it and trash talk the devs when a single cloud is out of place.
When I say “simulated”, I mean an optional system that is completely procedurally generated, like cold fronts, high and low pressure areas, storms, precipitation, etc… If it needs to use real-world METAR data to help “seed” the procedural weather in order to create believable variations, that’s fine, but it shouldn’t try to reproduce live weather conditions. It should also take into account the regions of the world and produce weather that is typical in those locations. (i.e. - Dry, arid regions, like deserts, should very seldom see rain or even rain producing clouds in the sim.)
A procedural weather system would give us variability that looks realistic (as opposed to pre-set weather that is the same across the entire world) without being completely dependent on real-world data being downloaded and presented accurately. I just want interesting realistic weather that varies as I fly, that’s all.
Well, yeah, I’m sure that would be the result, but I don’t think METAR should be removed, just have it as an optional way to create weather in the sim. The player should be able to choose which system they want to use.
Would be cool if the weather was forming by it self by heating of the earth like it is IRL. The thing is that all of that was simulated by meteoblue already. They only use real world data to do that simulation to predict the weather. Not always accurate but much more realistic than a METAR circle around the airport with identical weather in it stretched out to match that METAR.
I believe the more fluid system because that is what weather is IRL. It’s not believable to have a wall of rain around the airport because the METAR says it’s not raining.
The difficulty with the purely simulated weather were several:
mission planning was difficult as you could not consult a real world weather source and expect that to fit well at all with the SIM weather. Now of course a TAF or other forecast is only ever that: a forecast.
online flying was problematic as the live MSFS weather was often very different from that being used by ATC and other pilots flying on different sims and you would often end up having to make crosswind landings, an issue made worse by the fact that for some reason windspeeds were always higher than those given by METAR.
I’m not sure the present solution is the best or only option, but I’m not sure I would want to go back to what we had before. Maybe even allowing the user the option what live weather source to use would be nice.
But if they use a forecast model why not use the forecast to plan instead? I got used to plan with forecasts and have always used METAR before this sim. And now i preffer the forecasted system because it feels more realistic.
The root of this is back to Meteoblue’s 24 hour old predictive model not being very accurate and trying to blend that with real time METAR data. The METAR data isn’t the problem here. The (lack of) accuracy of the Meteoblue data in the sim is what’s been at the top of the bug list now for over a year for a reason.
The reason people need real weather is for flying on networks like vastsim so you need the same weather as the controllers and other pilots. Mostly for accurate runway assignments.
I did know before this sim got released this sim should use meteoblue and i used that since release and liked that system more than METAR for sure. Not always accurate to real weather but much more believable. Now they has that cross-section thing that i can predict the front perfect. It matches it. I can even predict and avoid cloudfronts before i actually get in the sim. I can see exactly at what direction the clouds will be thicker. Now with those METAR i noticed the clouds has got more generic and looks the same everywhere. I also noticed clouds that meteoblue predict over ground is removed in the sim. Thats why we see clear sky over UK most of the time because there it is predicted low clouds.
Sadly returning to a simulated only weather model it wouldn’t solve the online issue. But likewise I’m not a fan of the sudden transitions: I got RexWF after one too many horrible crosswind landing in Vatsim, but the transitions there are very sharp, and gladly went back to MSFS native weather after SU7.
As with so much in the SIM there is a diversity of needs depending on what each user values…so why not provide us different options?