This morning you have the weather almost 100% correct at my home airport
But please
Get rid of the bits in red - PLEASE !!! Just get RID of cumulus forever !
I like how you put checkmarks on the clouds 
This is how it is depicted now - not nearly the way it is in real life… in this image it looks like all hell is about to break loose:
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Unfortunately the euphoria about the live weather progress with SU8 has gone in the last 48 hours, as the old problem with the volcano ash clouds and puffy cumulus has returned to the sim.
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I really don’t know how realistic it is to expect accurate weather and clouds from a simple set of data from a single source in real time.
Weather is an extremely complex system. So I’m not sure how much accurate data about the individual layers of winds, size and types of clouds can actually be aquired. And then there’s the challenge of actually translating all that into something MSFS can understand and display and make sure MSFS even has the capability to display all the weather phenomena.
Also weather can sometimes vary greatly within a few kilometers. So if I get a set of weather date for my local airport it doesn’t necessarily mean the weather is the same where I live.
And then of course weather is dynamic. Acquiring the data, converting it and sending it to a Microsoft server probably takes some time as well. So the data might not be current enough either.
From what I see, most of the time the weather is reasonably similar to what I see when I look out the window. Is it 100% accurate? No it isn’t, but actually I don’t expect it to be. I expect it to improve further though.
What I really like to have changed is the depiction of winter. Snow on the lakes and rivers, snow on the roads everywhere even if it hasn’t snowed in days.
I would expect it to be easier to tell the sim NOT to display snow on water and roads (basically a YES or NO question) than to generate accurate weather.
Title edited to be more descriptive and helpful, and callouts to entities and individuals are against Code of Conduct.
I just want to understand why it’s more realistic to fly in a METAR-based weather.
What is realistic weather actually? Many says it’s realistic when it’s matching METAR 100%. is that true?
When we go outside how is the weather behaving IRL?
Does IRL weather matching METAR 100% or does METAR match the IRL weather 100%?
How can we use a METAR to create a realistic behaving weather?
Why is the weather in the sim more realistic when we can use tools to plan using real world METAR?
Does the plane behave more realistic in a weather that matches a METAR 100%?
Weather is also much a visual thing and to me it need to look realistic to be realistic.
Weather is also a fluid that doesn’t have a fixed/generic state. It’s a global fluid that does not have any transitions.
A solid mass is in a fixed state. Weather isn’t a solid mass. Metar is solid and also makes the weather solid for 30 minutes because the weather in the sim needs to match that solid state.
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No worries.
The only bit of hope I have is that the dev’s acknowledged in their latest dev q&a that a lot of work still needs to be done on weather.
What bothers me is that the weather WAS actually pretty good prior to SU7. If they could have just built on THAT, instead of the new system.
Heck, even if they can’t or don’t want to change the way its done at the moment, at least open the weather up to companies like ActiveSky to give us what we want. I really don’t see why they are so set against this. They open everything else up to 3rd parties - why not the weather ?
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Agree, visibility was not worth have the complete weather be changed. Well, it is what it is now. Nothing we can do about it.
Question remains how to make METAR-based weather believable. I think that they need to ask themselves in the dev-team. I think they need to change METAR values to fit those 60 layers of cloud-data prediction has.
At the same time they have a big challenge to make that believable 60 layers of created weather from METAR fit the predicted 60 layers of data without any noticable transitions.
That is how i would have done it. It’s a real challenge and the big challenge is to recalculate those 60 layers every 30 minutes and then injecting that new information without transitions.
No, you don’t. 
but most of people are accepting the METAR, how ?!
Maybe it’s nostalgic feeling? METAR has always been in use. And because it has it’s automatically the most realistic to many. A METAR has no improvement value. A METAR is what it is. A prediction can always be improved and it will in the future. We should have had some patience. Now they have two sources they need to improve rendering of instead of one and also needs to make them fit. It will stall the progress of weather in the sim.
We need to know that a METAR-report isn’t real weather either. Both METAR and predictions is only text and numbers. Weather is much more complex than that. To me predictions has the most detailed numbers of the weather. And those numbers is completely different than METAR numbers. It’s a real challenge make them fit. I really hope they make it work propperly. We can only wait and see. As it is right now i can’t enjoy it at all. Thats why i wanted an option to have the old weather without METAR. But thats not what the devs wanted so. We need to wait now until we can enjoy it. Nothing more we can do.
Yesterday I was flying from Bermuda to New orleans in the 320 neo. And from the start of my flight until the end, on LIVE weather, all i got the whole way was these little balls of white clouds scattered. It looked so fake. So in the distance there was good looking stuff but on my flight path just these little circles of scattered clouds. There is no way that was accurate.
Hello,
be careful, I have in real life now (I mean also had atoday within day time) at my place many of similar puffys, also dark grayed.
And…now we have yet another topic about weather that needs to be voted as we attempt to “grovel” our way to any meaningful changes by the team on the sim’s weather system.
I thought the plan was to merge all of these similar topics? I mean it’s readily apparent that many want improvements to the system, but the votes are spread out among so many different posted threads. If these votes were merged, would it make any difference?..
If you want to point out which ones are an exact match to this, we can merge them.
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I’ll leave that to you guys - you do an excellent job - I was just wondering aloud that I thought that was your policy, as I had noticed many other merged, lock topics recently.
But, I could have sworn there was a recent topic titled “weather depiction doesn’t match” or something along those lines…I think there was another similar one in the beta forum, as well.
I guess this was the topic to which I referred to previous post: Live Weather Does Not Match
And another: Vote Sim Update 7 Live Weather regression - a broken mess
Let’s us be honest here. A METAR is a snapshot in time and provides enough information for aviators to know the weather at a point location at that time.
It really does not contain enough information for a simulator to render cloud, vis, other meteorological effects at that location at that time, never mind a few miles away, at altitude, 30 minutes later. SYNOPs would be slightly better but still point in time/location.
And then trying to shoehorn them into a 4D space presented from forecast model data is totally crazy. Go fly in India or China, every airport has a bad vis bubble around it where they have tried to blend METARs with model data. So every departure/arrival is in low vis but the transit is clear. It is a folly and if you’d asked any meteorologist they’d have told you the same.
I am begging Asobo/Microsoft to stop messing around here. Get some applied aviation meteorologists onboard. Put all your efforts into implementing what they advise. Keep your Reno racing/Top Gun DLC stuff for when the hard but most important work is done.
An aircraft flies in its environment. If the environment is wrong then it is not a simulation.
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Or…hire proven 3rd party developers to the team - you could even release an improved weather system with advanced features as DLC. Or…stop being stubborn and open up the system for 3rd party development.
Why the need to re-invent the wheel?
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