I’ve been using Little Nav Map, Navigraph, Volanta, and LiveATC to the real ATIS more lately and the differences in weather are driving me crazy. They are all off enough that you can’t make runway choices. The World Map is terrible at reporting weather conditions. I feel like it’s often different between the map and sim launch.
It’s no wonder AI and multiplayer traffic are making all kinds of odd runway choices.
Is there a source, external to the sim, that shows the same weather in use by the sim?
From what I think I’ve read, the sim weather isn’t available over the APIs.
I find that specifics like runway winds are often off a little bit, but broad weather conditions and fronts and systems are fairly accurate, and winds aloft seem pretty good too. When I fill out a nav log from real weather the sim typically matches my estimates so it can’t be so bad.
Since MSFS 2020 get it’s primary weather information from Meteoblue, maybe a good source for that weather is the Meteoblue website - Weather Maps, metars , forecasts etc etc
I am not the one to ask --(way to complex, and under documented for me to make any snense of it)
The whole “weather” simulation is MSFS has become very complex, with multiple sources and processes going on… and there is no Weather SDK, as Asobo seems to want to keep the weather locked up under their control,
It’s one thing that I hope will be better designed and implemented in 2024, and made more open.
The weather is generally accurate but it’s fairly generic looking (lack of variety of cloud types) and not spatially specific (like individual convective cells aren’t really modeled). And it lags real-world position and development by at least 20-30 mins.
So major areas of rain, fronts, etc, are modeled pretty well and you can use forecast tools to get you in the ballpark, but you have to be careful around the margins of weather interfaces (fronts) because of the lag and picking around convection due to the lack of specificity.
I would guess MSFS has a business/enterprise contract with Metoblue for data not easily available to casual users such as oursevelves. And I doubt MSFS would be interested in any 10-day forecast information. Probably the contract does not allow redistribution of Metoblue to Navigraph or LNM or anyone else.
Heh, that’s going to depend on the end user. Some people look at departure and arrival METAR only and that’s it. Some people use SimBrief, which plans and gives you a weather brief for the entire route. But without proper convection and upper level cloud modeling, most of the enroute threats to high-flying aircraft (like thunderstorms, turbulence, and icing are pretty much non-existent. So maybe, again, METAR, winds aloft (at least what SimBrief spits out at each waypoint), and more astute folks might pay attention to the TAFs, especially as it comes to alternate planning.
Personally, as a mostly-GA (and maybe light executive) style simmer, I use about every weapon in the arsenal, going as far as to do a fairly full weather briefing at the beginning of my streams. So you name the type of forecast product - if it exists, I’m using it in some manner, and you might see some others do the same. Sometimes I use it to find awful weather so I can demonstrate use of forecasts/observations in flight planning, or fly approaches in bad weather, or just see how “off” the sim is compared to what’s really out there.
Here’s my stream from Saturday in which I look at a bunch of different forecasts (not 100% complete due to time, but I run through a lot) before I go fly NDB and VOR approaches in bad weather around Cape Cod (link goes to where I start looking at weather).
As an aside, I discovered I really don’t like the location of the ADF gauge in the Comanche, haha!
Also, here’s the link to the weather website I normally use for domestic (US) flights: https://aviationweather.gov
I also use Navigraph/SimBrief on occasion, especially for longer, higher flights and/or in transport-category aircraft.
