Historic Weather (as second timeline)

I agree. And don’t understand why this feature is ”not planned”.

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This is the #1 reason I’ve been looking into 3rd party weather is for historical weather. I want real weather, but for the time and date that I’m flying, not the “now” weather that live gives or having to select static weather manually.

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Yep, sadly this is yet another ignored and easy to implement feature that should have always been there.

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Ah sorry I missed the Dev Q&A this time, was a really busy week… Was really hoping to add this in as a question. I will need to set a reminder on my phone when I know the date for the next one… :frowning:

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I also wish there would be historic weather option. I loved that feature of ActiveSky in FSX. I don’t always want to be restricted from flying in the sim by bad real world weather but I also don’t want to fly with clear skies either.

Also it’s a lot of fun to recreate real life flights in the sim and therefore it’s awesome to have the historic weather option.

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Jörg Neumann is asking why historic weather would be important for users. So, here is my opinion.
(I searched the forum about a similar thread, but all I found was my thread about the need of historic weather nearly one year ago. So, I will repeat myself here)

For me, it is one of the most important features and I hope MS/Asobo will implement this?!

Several reasons to have it:

  1. I do not have always the possibility to fly during the day, so enjoying live weather is only possible in darkness. Yes, of course, I could turn the daylight on, but it doesn’t reflect then the (mostly warmer) weather of daytime
  2. Chasing nice or interesting weather conditions. As example, the day starts with a very nice autumn mist with low visibility. I go to work, come home, clear skies. With historic weather I could train my skills in low visibility
  3. Long haul flights with time acceleration.
    I’m sure time acceleration will be an option one day (to make it possible for people with less time to fly over the oceans or continents). Starting a flight in live time and accelerate it then, results in un-known weather condition as we fly then into the future.
    So, I will always start a flight where I use time acceleration, in the the past with the weather at that time, getting then also the right weather, when I switch back to current time after acceleration
  4. recreating holiday flights I have probably encountered, or similar (weather) events of the past.
  5. simply train a situation again and again.
    Having strong winds at one day and I’d like to get better and better in crosswind landings, I could recreate this situation with historic weather again and again (yes, I know, we could make our own weather scenario, but that is not the same and surely not as complex then as real weather would be)

I’m sure there are more examples and reasons, maybe we could collect them.
And I hope many people will join to support my demand about historic weather!

many thanks!

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I completely understand why historical weather is important. It is one of the attractive features of ActiveSky. However shouldn’t they get the weather working properly first? What’s the point of historical weather if it isn’t accurate?

This time synch problem resulting in either several day old weather or future weather being displayed is really silly. How can you trust what historical weather they provide you if they can’t produce accurate current weather?

If it’s true that Jörg Neumann asked why Historic Weather is important that would be really shocking and display a fundamental lack of understanding how weather works and how different it is during night time.

So yeah, I live in Europe and if I wanted to do a truly realistic daytime flight in Australia I would have to get up in the middle of the night to get proper Australian day time weather.

Historic Weather is imperative to simulate flights all over the world at all times of the day.

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Nice to have, but I rather have full focus on Live Weather for now.

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I think Jorg only asked because he wasn’t quite sure what people meant by ‘historic weather’. Do they mean giving the people to fly through famous storms from past decades or do they mean fly through last week or yesterdays weather, or perhaps a combination of both?

Sounds like it would involve an absolute ton of data being stored and shunted around anyway. I’d prefer they focus on really getting live weather working properly and accurately every time you use it.

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Your use case examples make a lot of sense…but the sheer volume of data to store historic weather globally for even a few days or weeks seems like something not worth the hassle and maybe not even possible with current technology to access and stream that on demand. As an alternative they could improve the user interface to allow for creation of more complex sim-generated weather so you could create weather changes along your planned flight (from clear to windy to storms, etc) as a way to practice and experience changing conditions during the flight. That would be far easier most likely than storing petabytes of historic weather data and trying to stream that on demand.

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Although I can’t prove, I do believe you are wrong. For example, the amount of data required to store, stream and display the Bing Map scenery is orders of magnitude greater than the weather data. While we need thousands of RGB and elevation data per each square meter (to say the least), weather data requires not much than one point of wind, temperature, pressure (maybe humidity) per square kilometer (or less, depending on the quality of the source data). This data may be stratified throughout an altitude interval.

Also, storage of historical meteorological data is fundamental for any weather service. That’s the point of automated weather stations. Weather models depend on the current and past measurements. So the data not only exists, I’m pretty sure it spans decades.

Just to ilustrate this, as a hobby, I made a meteorological station on my porch with a Raspberry Pi single board computer and has been collecting data points every minute for roughtly three months. The database it populated since measures 2.0MB (one and a half HD floppy disks, if you ever saw one of those). Below are snapshots of the last 24h and since the beginning of recording.



The measurements are temperature, humidity and pressure.

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Alle the historic data is already available at Meteoblue. So amount of Data shouldn’t also be different

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Also, ActiveSky is providing Historical Weather for ages now on FSX/P3D, even FS9 before that. Go figure.

It doesn’t even have to reach back all the way to creation. Just giving us the past week would already help a lot. Hell, even just having the last 24 hours available already would do and solve the major problem of time difference across half the world.

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I agree with every single point from guenseli.

My reason aligns with others I see. I work night shift, so my life runs at night, even when I’m flying on the weekends. I almost always change the time to be daylight, and I would love the weather to match the time I’m flying. The weather and clouds are both very different at night. I’m not flying at that time of day by choice. I’d say a week of historical weather would probably be sufficient.

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Historic weather has been requested several times.

So to sum up, why is historic weather important:

  • It has been a familiar feature in other sims (provided for example by Active Sky) for ages. I used it all the time and considered it a matter of course in a flightsim. It’s a shame that the current state of the art flight simulator lacks this feature.

  • Historic weather offers an abundance of different weather to choose from, just by selecting a date and time. Much more than weather presets ever can. And furthermore - different to weather presets - historic weather is realistic, diverse and dynamic.

  • Only historic weather allows to realistically experience any season in the sim - independent from the real world season. With live weather you set the date in the sim to July and still encounter a blizzard over New England when it’s December in the real world.

  • The same goes for the time of day. Historic weather is needed to experience a realistic scenario in any time of the day - independent from the real world time. Weather typically is different at different times of day: At night the temperatures are lower and the air is smoother than in daytime. There is morning fog that dissipates by noon, there is building cumulus in the afternoon. If we ever get gliders we will need the thermals of the daytime. Right now with live weather if you set the time in the sim to noon but it’s night in the real world you will get weather which is just not adequate.

  • Historic weather allows to relive experiences you’ve had in the real world:

You are a passenger in an airliner on a turbulent and stormy approach in the real world and look forward to recreate that approach in the sim when you get home. Impossible with live weather because the weather will have changed by the time.

You enjoyed a scenic ride in a Cessna last summer around some spectactular weather themes and want to recreate that experience a few months later in the sim. Impossible with live weather.

  • Historic weather allows to practice the same flight again and again. Impossible with live weather because the weather will be different every session - and weather presets just don’t offer the dynamic and variety of real historic weather.

  • There have been several threads in the forums where people enthusiastically tried to chase hurricanes. Bad luck for those who didn’t have time for simming at that very time. With historic weather it can be done any time.

  • If you want to do a VFR flight and find that the real world weather is too bad to allow a VFR flight your only choice now is to use a weather preset. How much more enjoyable it would be to just change the date and get realistic, varied and dynamic historic weather allowing for a VFR flight.

  • You don’t have time for a longer flight today but already look forward to the flight you will be doing next weekend. So you already plan that flight, create a simbrief flightplan etc. Just to find that wind, runways, time and fuel calculations will all be wrong when you actually do the flight a few days later with live weather. Only historic weather allows for that.

  • You set up a multileg rotation with an airliner. You are behind schedule on your first flight because of the headwind. But you already plan to catch up that time on the return flight thanks to the tailwind. Unfortunately you don’t have the time for that flight today and can only do it a few days later. With live weather your tailwind will be gone.

  • You plan a multileg / multiday VFR cross country trip. Because of your real world obligations a few days in the sim will take you a few weeks in real time. With historic weather you will be able to make these flights in a consistent and immersive weather scenario in the sim. Imagine you land at an intermediate stop with a front approaching on the horizon. You are aware that you need to hurry on the ground to make it out of this valley VFR for your next leg before the front arrives. But when you do that next leg the other day that front will be long gone of course with live weather.

  • Only historic weather allows to pause the flight for more than just a few minutes.

You have set up everything for the approach shortly before your TOD in an airliner, when real world obligations force you to pause the sim. When you continue the flight a few hours later all your approach settings are completely wrong because the live weather has changed.

Even worse, you have to pause your VFR flight midair while flying clear of clouds and find yourself in a thick soup some time later when you return to the sim - unable to continue your VFR flight unless you switch to a weather preset.

  • Historic weather opens up many new opportunities for screenshots and videomakers.

  • Last but not least historic weather simplifies the bugfixing. I remember when we had thunder and lightning out of the blue and Asobo had a hard time recreating this issue because of the ever changing weather conditions. It would have been easy to recreate with historic weather.

Please provide historic weather. It would give so many more possibilities to the sim and bring an already great flight simulator to another level.

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During yesterday’s Q & A, they mentioned looking for use cases for historic weather to get a better idea of what people are looking for; in my case, I might role the date back maybe a few days or a week or two, in order to find more suitable weather if the current conditions aren’t suitable for the plane I’m flying. I might even role the weather back just a few hours to get ahead of a front. In other cases, I might want to fly in a different season and so I might role the weather back a few months. I know I could use a weather preset or configure custom weather, but I like the dynamic aspect of the live weather, and the fact that the weather still varies geographically, which is great on long-distance flights.

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My most important reason for having some sort of historical weather option would be because real weather really gives a realistic weather depiction whereas the presets are obviously the same all over the planet and they feel artificial. I like VFR flying and flying ultra light aircraft but the weather isn’t always appropriate for it, I also hate flying in rainy weather. Now I have to switch to a way less exciting weather preset whenever the live weather isn’t right, but I’d rather have a more varying and realistic real weather dataset from another day.

So for me it isn’t really about having the weather from May 11th 2020 12:35, but having access to more realistic weather situations whenever the current (live) one isn’t appropriate. If some sort of random weather generator that can render realistic non-uniform weather patterns is able to do so, fine. Another option that would suffice my needs would be a database of say 30 wildly varying ‘weather days’ for the whole planet across the year so we can pick a typical summer day for our region or a typical winter day.

In all the time I had activesky throughout the years, I used historic weather exactly 0 times. I always fly real time real weather regardless of my schedules…kudos to whoever does find this useful, but im going to be the one to put my hand up and say let’s concentrate on other things.

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