Live weather is working great so far. However often there are very drastic changes in wind speed/direction or air pressure causing the aircraft to get thrown around during all stages of flight.
Yesterday i was cruising at FL450 in the Latitude and all of a sudden the wind changed from 109kts to just 45 knots causing an alarm.
Thinking of FSX and FSUIPC or Active Sky there was an option to smoothen out those changes to avoid unstable situations.
Yes! I’m surprised there is so little discussion of this problem. I see it most often when I fly a long flight at high altitude, but I’ve also encountered it over bodies of water (like Lake Michigan or off the western coast of Florida on the way to Key West). The weather conditions change instantly, causing a MASSIVE buffeting stress to the airplane. I have crashes turned off, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the intense wind changes would overstress the aircraft.
This behavior suggests to me that the real-world weather is not physically consistent. The global forecast model data from MeteoBlue which is being used for upper-level weather should be completely physically consistent, with no sudden changes in space or time. My guess is that the sim is stitching together multiple data sources (METAR and MeteoBlue model data, for example) in a way that creates artificial “boundaries” between datasets.
I think you’re right. Live Weather used to be missing over portions of North America, and when you mentioned Key West it made me remember that the line of demarcation between data and no data was somewhere around there. They stitched in the missing data, but apparently there’s still a seam.
I’d love a behind the scenes tour of what they’re doing over there with the weather data, but it’s proprietary trade secrets so I’m sure we’ll never see that.
This periodic change in either pressure, wind, or both is wreaking havoc during my flights. Yesterday I was in an area with 120+ kt winds and at FL360. I was keeping the cruising speed at 20 kts below Vmo, to be on the safe side because of the jumps in wind and pressure. Sure enough, I had the wind increase by 45 kts in an instant and BOOM, airframe failure.
So I started the flight again, and as before, a wind speed spike with a pressure shift of more then 0.12 inHg and BOOM another airframe crash. I had enough of that nonsense. I disabled the airframe stress setting until I’m flying in calmer winds or Asobo gets this fixed (which is the expected solution to the problem).
Also, the jumps and drops in pressure during cruise is a pain when flying the CJ4 without autothrottle. Throttle is set during cruise, then a pressure change and ATC is telling me to descend, airspeed increases and I’m messing with the throttles again to dial in the cruising speed. Then just as I have everything set, another pressure change back to what it was before and now ATC is telling me to climb and I’m messing with the throttles again. This has been going on for months and Asobo doesn’t even say if they know about the problem.
I totally agree. There needs to be some radical improvement to weather -system. There needs to be gradual transitions between “boxes”. Idially there should be no boundaries between boxes - only gradients - gradients in pressure and wind and temperature and moisture - modelling of cold and warm fronts with the transition between the airmasses. Also - there needs to be wind-modification of clouds.
I have seen several times the modelation of wind over mountains. They shoud include calculations of temperature and dew points - so one could have “orographic” clouds - clouds in mountain waves - included rotor.
Thermals should be modelled acurately - with a broader basis and "bubbles " of air streaming upwards into cumulus clouds. Wish some one at Asobe flew sailplanes - hope they will do soon.