Since SU7 everybody is talking about haze. I don’t understand how or why this term became so popular all of a sudden, especially since most posts I see on the forum are really about mist or fog! So hereby I present to you, the (aviation) definitions of fog, mist and haze:
Haze:
“Obscuration due to dust or smoke particles in the air, or as a result of surface heating causing turbulence and refraction of light in the layer of air above the surface. Haze is associated with dry, and usually hot, conditions and reduces visibility especially air to ground visibility.”
Mist and fog:
“Mist and Fog are the terms used to describe low visibility caused by water droplets suspended in the air. Mist is a term used to describe visibility of greater than 1 km while Fog is the term used when visibility is less than 1 km.”
So stop using the term “haze” where it is not applicable .
Not sure about msfs use, but haze/smog was popular as far back as, and maybe further than, that time Jethro wanted to clean LA air by drilling a huge tunnel into the Santa Monica mountains and had Jed convinced to pay for it. That is, until Mr. Drysdale found out and didn’t let Jed spend his money on it…
Flight Simulator doesn’t discriminate between haze and mist from what I can tell. It reads the METAR and reduces the visibility using a grey volumetric effect.
But also, most of the time haze and mist are actually a mixture of both dry particulate (haze) and water condensate (mist)
Yeah it’s been bugging me lately.
Both haze and mist are characterized by making the visibility less than 5 km but greater than 1 km.
The difference is that mist is reported due to high humidity, haze is the exact opposite.
At least that’s how we do it in Europe in the METARs.
What if you have haze and mist? That’s usually what we have here in the US MIdwest in the summer, high humidity and particulate in the air. And the particulate forms condensation nuclei making for “wet haze”. Add more moisture and it’s just called mist at some point. And even more and then it’s just fog.
It’s all pretty arbitrary really, and since Flight Simulator doesn’t know the composition of what the mist/haze is, the whole thing is pretty moot.
One of the major problems people are reporting is that airports across the US max out at 10sm visibility. Since the actual relative humidity at most of these conditions is low, and given the visibility distance, this would actually be haze:
Hello friends,
it is probably the case in our simulator that the clouds do not go all the way down to the horizon and that looks stupid and unrealistic, because there is no haze in the distance that shows over the horizon below. and thus shows the transition softer upwards. Without the haze in the distance, the clouds just look like an arriving sandstorm. So Asobo give us the haze in the distance, either with a slider. Or that there is a minimal haze that just makes the transition softer.
@anon50268670 I wonder if your OP covers all… most non-English speakers will know the word from “hazy morning” which is mist, sometimes as a result of dew, not smoke or dust,
So long as folk understand that in real life in most cases mist and fog is actually just very low clouds.
Also in MSFS I notice over sea that from above clouds often look like they are at sea level because of their exaggerated and uniform flat bottoms … and of course because we are viewing in 2D.
Sure… unless that 2/3 km visibility is caused by dust or smoke.
It’s neat to see the sim reducing the visibility to try to match reported conditions over the Sahara today. It would be cool if it could get the particulate type right using the Meteoblue model though. Then the sim could use its brown tinted aerosol rather than the white it’s using for the haze/mist everywhere.
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