Anyone seen it in live weather? Almost 60 hrs in and never seen it once. Even if the live weather is working correctly, the aerosol density is always zero.
Now we know that aerosol density lowers visibilty and by its description “An aerosol is defined as a suspension system of solid or liquid particles in a gas. An aerosol includes both the particles and the suspending gas, which is usually air”, it means that if this aerosol density is zero, we have infinite visibility during live weather. Those ground level clouds trying imitate ifr foggy conditions shouldn’t be the only way to reduce visibility during live weather.
i’m pretty sure aerosol doesn’t work period. I’ve cranked it up to 100 via a text editor and all it does is make the air red. Doesn’t reduce visibility whatsoever. The only way to create ‘fog’ is to create ground level clouds. I guess that’s what fog is but meh. It seems the actual visibility reducing fog is tried to precipitation. If you crank rain up to 100 you can barely see 10 feet in front of you.
I think all we need now is for their weather engine to take aerosol density into account while generating live weather. I know this for sure that Aerosol density does effect visibilty. It is actually haze which is caused when sunlight encounters tiny pollution particles (aerosols). As the aerosol density increases, the absorption and scattering of light also increases which triggers low visibility or hazy conditions. This should be filed as a bug report.
I think I’ve maybe heard this term once during my ADX and those questions are a pool of 1800 that are hardly up to date. I’ve never professionally used or heard aerosol density while flying or dispatching. It’s always been strict visibility “as the crow flies” and RVR reports. I couldn’t imagine reading my weather briefing with my FO going “oh, my aerosol density is high today”. Let’s just keep it with visibility in feet/meters and adding in RVR wouldn’t hurt either.
The terminology is wierd from an aviation perspective but is quite correct from a metereological one. Variation in aerosol density is directly propotional to haze which in turn effects visibility. But yes since this is a flight sim, a visbility slider would have been more appropriate. I wonder how many people still dont know what that aerosol slider does and are probably happy with unlimited visibility which is totally unrealistic.
Right, I know the term within meteorology and is quite a pertinent weather variable. As you stated however, it’s not so appropriate within a flying simulation where… it’s not even recognized as official ICAO standard terminology I believe.
