On a warm, sunny day in real life (think: Clear Skies preset), you’ll have mild (sometimes moderate) turbulence until roughly 4,000’. There’s a palatable smoothness when I reach this layer that I just don’t get in the sim. I’ve tried to set winds at the ground, and at 4,000’ hoping once I’m above this level it will calm down but nope. More turbulence.
How much elevation does a wind layer affect? Does the wind start where you’ve added it? Does it affect everything below it? Above it?Within x thousand feet one way or the other??
(Clouds have a height adjustment… it’d be nice if wind layers did too.)
You may be experiencing the notorious heat-only thermals in MSFS. General observations are that they are too powerful, they extend too far up, and there are far too many of them. While I do not agree with the opinion that they should be completely removed to appease a few glider pilots, something does need to be done to temper them. You may also notice that if you turn the wind off, the heat-only thermals diminish significantly, which actually makes no sense at all.
Trees are coded to destroy lift, so if you fly over suburban areas with buildings and trees, that incessant bumping is you basically flying through tunnels of lift and sink that are somehow preserved thousands of feet up, even through a wind layer.
Its not to “appease a few glider pilots”. I and some other reporting weather problems are RL glider pilots who spend hours in air only because we can properly read the sky and accurately find thermals, no kind of powered flying requires so much skill in reading weather as weather is literally our engine and we quickly are able to detect absurdities and lack of realism in current msfs weather.
Current model is broken as they simply cut off ground thermals height if they do not arrive near cloud, while in RL such thermal would either create cloud or be so insignificant it wouldn’t arrive at condensation height. Cloud and thermals should be a cause (thermal) and effect (cloud) system with proper lifecycle while now clouds are generated independently from ground thermals giving unexpected and too much lift mostly everywhere.
Thank you for the information. Do you think the discussed lift is what the OP is experiencing? I see a lot of heated debates about turbulence, and I also see discussions on soaring and weather. I’m assuming connections there as I don’t understand all that much about aviation wx yet, but I don’t always see the discussions overlapping. Maybe I’m connecting dots incorrectly.
No problem, I only want to show that glider pilots are on the same team with other people demanding weather realism.
As for ops experience - in RL (with little oversimplification but good enough) air is heated not by the sun but by ground (ground is heated from the sun), this results in temp lapse rate - often visualized as skew-t diagrams - but in most times at some height - like those 4000feet or even higher there is temperature inversion - that is ambient air is hotter with height - and this effectively is a barrier for most thermals - as air cannot rise if surrounding air is less dense (hotter) - this is why in RL flying above inversion height is smooth rode and below it you have turbulence/thermals.
Btw if there is smog/dust in air this inversion height is quite visible as this dirty air is trapped by inversion (BTW there is a bug report about it as in msfs it is rendered as fog instead of layer).
Sometimes clouds are able to rise to significant inversion heigh and then they spill all over it to the sides - like the anvil of cumulonimbus clouds.
Generally setting single cu layer low should allow in msfs to fly above thermals as they should limit thermals height to cloud tops, Seb said about it in latest dev stream, but also noted that limit height is not accurate.
Maybe? I actually want the ground thermals, but would like them to go away a few thousand feet up, as they do IRL. I can add a Wind layer, but then it’ss all too intense. Remove all winds and I don’t feel them at all.
Who knows?
I am still curious, if I’ve set a wind layer at say 4,000’ does that affect 4,000’ and below? 4,000’ and above? A thousand feet either side??
