Great live weather transition / METAR blending

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I flew an IFR flight in the sim a few days ago, in New York, from KFRG - KSMQ. I couldn’t help but notice that the weather depiction and, significantly, the blending of live METAR data and model data, was really well done. I’m hoping this means there is back-end work occurring, improving this. (I’m not on the SU8 beta.)

Weather in the area was messy, with a large wave of showery precip pushing into the northeastern U.S., a mix of rain and snow. Once I broke out on top of the low layer, things looked as you’d expect on such a day - a broken to overcast layer, with embedded towering cu where the showers were:

As I proceeded southwest into the approaching front, precip coverage became denser, with corresponding precip fog lowering visibility in many places. This matched with real-world radar at the time; however here’s what I found interesting: several of the METARs in the area at the time indicated better vis than surrounding areas, with only light precipitation on the field. This is expected during an unstable airmass / showery precip event; some places will have pretty low weather, and others will be better. Note the weather depiction in the sim:

You may have to enlarge that image, but you can see that my destination airport is in a “hole” in the precip; an area of lighter precipitation. If you look at the bottom of the MFD, you can see that Newark (KEWR) and Essex (KCDW) are in similar areas of lighter precip. In all three cases, real-world METARs indicated 4-6SM vis in light rain or snow (better than the 1-2SM in moderate RA or SN in other places.)

But you’ll also note that these regions are not perfectly round “bubbles;” the reporting airport is simply within a realistically irregularly shaped area of lighter precipitation. The airport is not centered within this area either, interestingly.

The most interesting thing was how this played out visually on approach. There were no hard transitions of weather; I simply flew into a gradually improving region of lighter rain/snow and improving visibility. Here’s a few screenshots, but you really have to see the video to appreciate the smoothness of it:

Video here; the last few minutes show the breakout:

I’m hopeful that this indicates they’re making inroads on blending METAR data with model data, and providing seamless visual transitions in the weather. On this particular flight, I really can’t see how it could have been done any better.

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This is interesting. I may finally be able to turn on live weather.

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This does look good. Especially the nice overcast look that was missing until recently.

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i tried this morning and nothing has changed…except some locations (as usual) where the weather might look better, for the vast majority of places is still the usual mess with towering dark and very low clouds…with of course no other type of clouds whatsoever!

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Can I ask your data source for the assertion that the “vast majority” of people and places see no improvement?

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I said places not people. And I have been BETA testing since the release, and since su7…for me the majority of places are absolutely wrong in the displaying of the cloud types and coverage. I am no going to post any photos anymore as me and others have done that extensively!! as I said I tried again this morning, just out of curiosity, and while Belfast has a coverage of mostly high stratus with some lower one…all i got in the sims was convection, for this you can refer to the many posts around the forum…

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I’ve seen those screenshots and I agree there are still incorrect depictions in some places… but I find it interesting that the “METAR bad!” folks seem to ignore all the photo and video evidence that weather depiction is often very GOOD. I was told a while ago that I’d be unable to find real overcast in the sim. I posted screenshots of solid overcast at the first two airports I checked. Oddly, there was no response…

Then there are the flatly incorrect assertions about weather that you see on the forum. Things like it being unrealistic that an airport is fogged in while it’s clear 10 miles away, or that cumulus clouds somehow don’t exist in winter.

It’s obvious that some of the commenters are not familiar with what weather actually looks like in flight, and it seems that some folks don’t even go outside too much. The bias is just strange.

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The bias and push for METAR is even stranger. Does live weather really look and behave better than before? I haven’t even seen thin, sunlight-blocking overcast clouds yet since SU7. Mainly it’s been brute-forced thick, purple TCU.

They may have tweaked the METAR bubble shapes, but it’s still like poking holes in the global meteoblue weather simulation to patch in METAR data. Those patches must remain static until the next report while the forecast weather wants to continue as predicted.

What I mean by this (scroll through the video)

See how the clouds are on some kind of loop? Not natural if you ask me and I think most would agree.
The sudden wind transitions (not gusts) is another issue. Experienced those yet?

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Well for us/me the weather is often bad! I wouldn’t mind the METAR if the quality of realism was like pre su7, now? For me 90% of the time I just get towering clouds, cumulus clouds, popcorn clouds when it should be clear, total absence ov any other cloud type. This happen so often that I don’t play it much anymore until it’s fixed! I can give you the doubt about METAR in a way that only Asobo can know for sure if the clouds issues are caused by it or some other nasty bug or glitch in the coding…

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Live weather is a joke, it’s been snowing in my city for about 6 hours and in game it shows clear starry skies

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I think there has been a lot of progress in live weather with this SU8. The “new” problem though is hard to ignore: the sim can’t depict clear skies. Clear skies = floating popcorn clouds everywhere. Too bad - because the rest was looking fantastic when I tried it out today after updating.

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my weather still broken. Everywhere is 3 knots even at FL450.

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But you see my point, that in all the photo and video evidence I shared in this thread, none of those problems are evident. Not a single one. This entire flight, the weather worked properly.

I have more and more IFR flights with good weather depictions these days. I haven’t seen the purple, volcanic towering cu in a long time. I don’t doubt it’s still popping up occasionally, but it’s certainly less frequent than it was. And as my pics and video show, METAR blending is now excellent… so we can have both pretty, but also (more importantly) accurate weather.

I’ve tried to have discussions on where and how the problems pop up, because it’s clear not all users experience them the same way. Objectively, it’s clearly getting better. The evidence is right up there ^^^. But it seems like - as when I was told I’d be unable to find overcast and pasted pics of overcast - it just gets ignored for some reason.

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Does live weather behave better than before? Before Metar integration when I frequently saw real world weather data reporting low IFR, and it was clear skies in the sim because Meteoblue blew their frontal passage prediction by 6 hours?

Yes. It behaves quite a bit better than that. :wink:

I see what your video shows, but… why would that bother you? Do you often sit and watch the weather for twenty minutes in a zoomed out drone view? The sim is to be flown in, right? It seems to me that that system will work perfectly, by realistically blending the visuals of accurate airport weather with the model weather. That’s exactly what we need to fly in and out of an airport and have accurate weather and a smooth transition.

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No idea how you see “good” weather like you say you do ( and maybe you are ) , but MANY MANY guys/gals on here only sees volcanic towering cumulus, very little decent, proper overcast and absolutely no variation in cloud types ever since SU7 dropped. Depicted weather mostly does not even remotely match what is possible in the region you are flying - example - towering Cumulus in the middle of Winter over England.

We’ve tried to bring this point across to Asobo numerous times on these forums, including the BETA forums.

All cloud types currently rendered in sim are variations of cumulus in shape, size and opacity. I think it’s been this way since the start, but prior to SU7 the depiction was at least a lot more plausible.

Then there is the apocalyptic black masses of clouds which seems to be the result of overlapping layers causing some sort of shading anomaly ( try overlapping two thick layers in preset weather and see what I mean )

Many have also speculated that it all went south when XBox users were brought onto the scene. The weather seems to have been “dumbed” down to make it playable on consoles, however, I have no proof of this, but it certainly feels that way.

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I 100% agree with everything you have said in your post, especially this bit:

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To be fair here, this same shading anomaly has been spotted in the X-Plane 11.60 …errrrr… X-Plane 12 teasers. I wonder why it’s so hard to get cloud shading correct, since two software companies, working on essentially the same problem, can’t get it right?

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Have you read the original post, seen the pics and watched the video? There’s no need to take my word for anything… all the proof is right there.

And again with the falsehood about never seeing cumulus clouds in the winter… where does this come from? Have you ever flown in the winter around snow showers? Why do you think an unstable airmass is somehow impossible in the winter??

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Have you seen any clouds which are not cumuloforms?

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Well absolutely. Have you seen my screenshots in the OP? A nice stratus layer with embedded cu.