Is ATIS accurate

So I’m trying to establish which wind report is accurate to what’s going on in the sim. ATIS or what’s displayed by your Garmin? Currently the two don’t match up, not even close. For example I flew into London city. ATIS said airport winds were 30knots at 270 while my Garmin said the winds were only 5knots when landed. It showed 30 knots at about 1500 feet but got less and less as I came into land. So which one is depicting what’s going on in the sim? The ATIS or the Garmin?

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In real life ATIS is a report that is updated regularly ever 60 (e.g. US) or 30 mins (e.g. Germany) or amended when significant changes happen.

Garmin shows you the current wind information based on your in flight data like TAS and Ground Speed and calculates wind components.

Can these be different from the ATIS. Of course! First of all, ATIS mentions weather on the ground while you are flying mid air. Typically with increasing altitude wind will change direction and increase in velocity due to less surface friction.

Also the moment you arrive at the airport most of the time the conditions you will encounter are (slightly) different from the reported conditions in the ATIS. Which makes sense since the ATIS is a scheduled report which can be up to an hour old.

I think that the ATIS message in the sim is different from the real world in that sense that any time you request it you would get the information based on the currently prevailing conditions.
Youre altitude which is different from the fields elevation will and should still add variance.

Yes but if ATIS says winds at airport are 30knots and my Garmin says 5knots, why such a difference?

True. I think the weather and the systems are still not completely working.

I just wanted to point out that there can or there should be differences because of the mentioned reasons.

and don’t forget that Garmin shows you the relative numbers based on your current Track over ground. But you were saying that you were on final when you compared it.

Thanks. I compared Garmin and ATIS when on the ground at London City. Garmin said winds were 5knots, ATIS said 30knots

I noticed the wind was different from all sources at London city. So the world map said 25 knots, ATIS said 19 knots, the screen on the left that pops up before you click fly now said 11 knots and my Garmin said 5knots. This is all at ground level at the airport! Any idea which one is correct if any?

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I think there is an « issue » with ground winds at the moment. I’m not sure if it’s on purpose or not. While I agree the winds don’t have to be exactly the same at any given time as the ATIS report, I’ve seen consistently the same pattern: stronger winds reading by ATIS and light winds on the ground through the Garmin (usually 5-7kts).
I don’t know how it is suppose to be in real life. I don’t know where the Garmin get the data from, is it captors on the plane? There are plenty of reasons the wind reading from the ground can be lower, main reason being obstacles. But even after taking off usually winds will match the ATIS only after hundreds of feet of climbing.

I think MSFS may interpret the RL METAR winds as wind speed at 1000ft or so.
Where I’m living, there’s a storm right now, with wind speeds up to 65kts at ground level, but in-game, I only got that passing 800 - 1000ft. Lower than that, winds gradually lowered to about 15kts on touchdown.

Yes this what I see. The winds seem correct at height, but bleed off quickly as you approach ground level, irrespective of how windy ATIS says it is. I see this on the Garmin as you come into land and also you can feel the wind dying as the air becomes more stable near the ground. So I think the Garmin is probably accurately reflecting what’s going on in the sim. I wonder if Asobo have done this on purpose to make it easier to land for new entrants to flight simming?

Yes same here. It’s a shame because landing would be so much more fun if the winds were higher at ground level. I think the ground friction simulation has been overdone

Yes I am starting to think too that the wind gradient is overdone. I’ve read that even with real METAR data with the last Rex product the winds on the ground are too low. It looks like they applied some sort of filter over all ground winds which shouldn’t be the way to do it, in my opinion. Wind data at ground level should already factor ground friction, no need to change it more.

I think Asobo applies the gradient because they do NOT use METAR but wind reports from Meteoblue which are probably not surface winds.
The fact that this doesn’t work for METAR winds injected by REX product is not Asobo’s fault.

But I still agree that the gradient feels a little too harsh.
Just don’t mix up the false behavior of third party applications with what the sim does out of the box with live weather since it makes the basic issue more complex than needes.

Looks like they fixed something about gradients!

Yes it’s on patch notes! And they’ve added lightning to live weather

Lots of the ATIS do not work! There are several airport that are supposed to have ATIS and doesn’t work. Weather doesn’t reflect METARs. Latest patch didn’t do anything to fix this.

ATIS is not accurate for Cloud Cover and Visibility. Even if the airport is overcast in the sim, it’ll say “Few Clouds at 1,200, Few Clouds at…” and likely 3 mile visibility.

I have a bug report in for this, please upvote it if you’d like to see atis match sim conditions

My favorite part of ATIS is tuning in and having to wait through METAR’s of 3 different airports to finally hear mine, if it even comes in. And then waiting all over again to catch anything I missed.

Hi, I’m having a problem for ATIS since latest patch. I’m unable to tune ATIS on Airports which has the frequency, while I’m flying. The ATIS option on ATC windows doesn’t appear while approaching the airport, it only appears as an option after I landed.

Alsso, I tried to enter manually the frequency on COM2, but nothing happens.

There is someone with a similar problem, workaround, or the right way to tune ATIS?

Thanks.