The 10nm visibility is the max to be reported on any METAR, not only in the US. I suspect the new reading of METARs is too blame here. METAR is perfect for weather around airports and a great addition, but it cannot help for any understanding of visibility.
Also, visibility provided on METAR is the distance where lighting can be seen, not necessarily s humans ability to see features in the terrain. However, often looking down, the ground will be visible everywhere, while the visibility horizontally is limited (thin layer of haze/fog)
I think this should get its own thread we can vote on it. They obviously seem to lack the understanding about all that.
We need to make them aware.
Also, exactly stuff like that is why they should open up the weathersystem to 3rd paarty devs. There are peoples out there who do this since decades and seem to have a better knowledge about all this.
Iām seeing clouds way too low and the unrealistic haze just adds to the problem. Itās so bad I was look to ActiveSky for an alternate solution but they seem to have left the building with FS2020. Clouds sitting on top of the water in the Caribbean is just wrong and IFR conditions where there shouldnāt be any is just crazy. We need a hotfix for this.
Problem is that this is not one separate bug? And honestly, some of those bugs might have been there already pre-SU7, I never really paid attention to the live weather by comparing it to the real world METAR. Forgetting the magnetic variation when using a weather source which uses true directions or forgetting that clouds are reported above ground level instead of sea level (if that is indeed what is going on here) are really rookie mistakes.
Where does this term āhazeā everybody is talking about come from? Was that in the release notes? Because most problems I see people describing in all those threads have nothing to do with haze, those are rather mist or fog and / or low cloud issues.
Huh? Youāre playing a flight simulator and you donāt like having to fly in weather? Thatās the whole point of this game! Some places in the world will have bad weather fly elsewhere or make up your own weather.
Iām not sure if its meant as haze. Apperently, the altitude of clouds is now projected as MSL instead of AGL. They might just be wrongfully deployed cloud layers.
Here Iāll try to break this down again. Watch this video:
Now imagine itās clear of clouds over your plane and you have miles of visibility in every direction, and then in the next instant the visibility is basically zero. Here are the problems with this:
Itās completely unrealistic. This simply doesnāt happen in the real world. Yes, VFR pilots get into scrapes all the time where the weather closes in around them or theyāre scud running and inadvertently fly VFR into IMC (fly into a cloud), but the situation in the above video should never happen in a game thatās simulating realistic weather behavior.
Itās a life or death emergency for a VFR pilot. An IFR pilot, while this could still be quite problematic, totally unrealistic, annoying, distracting, or immersion breaking could deal with this. But a pilot relying on visual reference to the ground is probably going to die. This situation could happen in the sim even if you do your due diligence and obtain a weather briefing along your route, say from Airport A to B and the conditions are VMC (visual weather) along the entire route. But if Airport C miles off of your route happens to be IMC, and you happen to get within a certain radius of C, OR the METAR at C happens to update during your flight, then the weather could instantly change to extreme IMC (instruments needed or you die weather). In real life, you can actually see the weather youāre flying into. Airport C may very well be IFR in real life, but I would see the clouds/fog/mist blanketing it before I flew into it. I could divert, I could fly over it, whatever. But now the situation is that, on any given flight over the LA area (or elsewhere), I might just instantly encounter weather that totally breaks a VFR flight, and itās because the simulator is wrong and unrealistic. Not because thatās how weather actually works.
So the major problems that SU7 has introduced are thus:
Live Weather now behaves in a totally unrealistic manner.
Live Weather is totally inaccurate over large areas
At itās best when working as expected, even with good forecast and observed weather data, Live Weather can still be significantly inaccurate.
Does it make sense now that Iām not talking about how I donāt like flying in weather, but that I donāt like flying in unrealistic and inaccurate weather?
That could very well be happening as well. The examples I posted above from KONT were definitely from the visibility variable in the METAR though. I could see the visibility change instantly as the METAR updated, and flying above it showed that misty fog layer, not the simās cumuliform cloud type it uses for everything.
Wouldnāt surprise me that theyāre hurriedly trying to tweak this server side, or that they launched SU7 with the METAR blending completely off line. They originally launched the game with Live Weather totally absent or broken over large areas and slowly fixed it over the first few updates.
It could also be that the weather is just different though. People thought the blue sky lightning bug was fixed and then came back again after a later update, but really it was just winter time and the lightning returned in the spring.
I can reproduce these issues pretty consistently, so Iāll give them another look. I had a flight over San Fran last night though and there wasnāt the omnipresent mist which was a welcome surprise.
Just the radio message āCan you see the Tafficā ??? How can you see the traffic in such a haze? And the best the copilot replies, "Yes, I see the traffic. The boy must have X-ray eyes. I canāt see anything.
I think it might be the data feed but could be wrong. Hopefully they can fix it there this week. Either way itās a big game breaker for me. Not sure if itās just my area but I canāt see anything. And itās clear fall day with no humidity.
Iād guess the hard transition is a simulator problem and not a server side problem. The server probably merely sends corresponding data points, and itās up to the simās software to blend between them as you fly.
I havenāt done much real investigating, but this seems to be true to me. Visibility is really bad with live weather when flying in the USA, but looks great everywhere else.
I just completed a flight from Detroit to Raleigh-Durham NC (KRDU) in the Aerosoft CRJ-700. METAR weather at Detroit was low overcast with rain and 4 miles visibility which was well depicted. I did not break out of the clouds in climb until almost 25,000 feet.
Descending over North Carolina the clouds became broken, then scattered. There was no evidence of haze until descending below about 8000 feet, and even then it was light, and in patches here and there - not everywhere.
KRDU METAR was calling 10 miles with a temp/dewpoint spread of 11 degrees C. Visibility was good on the approach to runway 23L and remained so until landing. I am very familiar with this airport and its environs. Visibility was probably between 16 and 20 miles. There was a very light haze layer, but nothing out of the ordinary for humidity of 55 percent.
Since I suspect that all elements of live weather can be adjusted on the servers before being pushed to MSFS clients, perhaps they are working on adjusting the haze injection logic after reading the many complaints here on the forum.
On this particular flight, I saw nothing to complain about at all regarding the weather depiction, but I will try more tests in other areas.
