I’d like to suggest to MS and Asobo/MeteoBlue to improve the live weather data for Australia.
METAR data for Australian airports is freely available from the Australian Government’s Bureau of Meteorology website - Aerodrome Weather Reports (METAR/SPECI) (bom.gov.au) - and would really add to an area that is sorely lacking in live weather!
I am aware of a previous topic that was raised about injecting the data - Australian Airport Weather data - General Discussion & Community Support / General Discussion - Microsoft Flight Simulator Forums - however given the closed design of the weather system, this is something that needs to/should be incorporated.
I’m curious where Australian weather comes from. I just finished flying through a massive weather system using "live weather” that pretty closely matches what I’m seeing on the BOM weather radar.
But for some reason, even though the clouds were very heavy, there was never any precipitation present. I wanted to check the actual METAR values to see if they contained rain or not. But every airport along the route is showing “no metar available”
But in spite of these “no metar available” results, this live weather system is obviously appearing in FS2020 and coming from somewhere. How does this work, and where can I check what the actual in-sim precipitation values are or should be, to see if the lack of rain is possibly a bug?
Some potential insight…. Australian BOM is one of the few local aviation weather data providers that do not provide public domain data. It is available without cost in a limited fashion only to non-commercial entities. Any commercial entity (from a small add-on developer to a large company like MS) needs to obtain specific authorization which includes a contract access fee. For a small add-on developer like myself the access fees quoted are extremely untenable. I have no idea what kind of fees a large company would be subject to, but it also may be too high to be considered. With that, this may explain why complete Australian METAR data hasn’t been available (to my knowledge) in any entertainment-based flight simulation software or add-on. Some large/international AUS airports are available by some international providers offering public domain access (such as NOAA), but I believe the number of airports is less than 10.
1 Like
Weather in the sim is only partially blended from METAR. The majority of the weather doesn’t come from METAR but from the MeteoBlue computed real-time and forecast weather.
If there is no METAR available for an airport, the weather will be coming from that MeteoBlue source. There is no “report” or anything that contains the MeteoBlue weather data (which is many, many GBs of high resolution data per datapoint worldwide).
2 Likes
It would still be nice if FS could “fill in” the matching METAR values for airfields where these are otherwise just permanently blank. It shouldn’t be too difficult to populate METAR values based on the current simulated weather over that area, so we can “read” the type of weather at our destination airport.
