MS/Asobo pay for the access to data MeteoBleu owns and have to abide by the legal terms stipulated by MB. I seriously doubt MB has in the terms that their customers are allowed to give access to 3rd parties. What PMDG and Fenix effectively want to do, is to create their own weather maps based on data they do not have paid for or own.
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Why inject data into the radar when we should have radar propperly simulated?
The radar works on the echo principle. The radar transmitter produces a signal which is reflected by water droplets in the clouds. The reflected signals are then collected by the receiver and processed to give the weather display to the pilots. The signal consists of a narrow radio beam with a width of about 3 degrees.
How Pilots Use Weather Radar To Avoid Storm Cells.
Whatever they do we will never have a “realistic” radar system if they not simulate the radar propperly but i think that is impossible to achieve.
How do you suppose they simulate the radar if they don’t have access to the data from MeteoBleu? It means API. And license. MS/Asobo is not in a position to provide those to them.
I agree with what you said about Meteoblue is not free and 3rd parties can’t provide own radar systems. But if the radar were simulated as it works IRL the radar should produce data of the weather that is happening. Shouldn’t need data injected into the radar.
Whatever we get in the sim, it will never be a propperly simulated radar system. Even if Meteoblue provided the data.
Whatever we get is a computer simulation based on code, not an actual radar pinging the surroundings we see on the screen.
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Exactly. Thats why i feel it’s better to work on the actual weather first to get that as realistic as possible first. Then maybe focus on the radar system that is useless right now anyway. We can fly in hurricanes or TS without danger in whatever plane we like. Maybe the radar will “look” more realistic.
As far as I can tell from their statements, PMDG at least don’t want data “injected into the radar” - they want access to the raw weather data (same data used by the sim to create the clouds, precipitation and haze in the first place) so they can parse that and produce something in the cockpits of their aircraft that looks to the sim pilot like a realistic three-dimensional Doppler weather radar display, complete with adjustable beam tilt and pan to show precipitation at various elevations and bearings ahead of, above and below the moving aircraft. They don’t want some generic sim-created bitmap or series of bitmaps. They want the raw data.
Undoubtedly this is both a technical issue with the sim to create a usable API to include in the SDK, AND a contractual issue with MeteoBlue and Microsoft/Asobo to negotiate.
Yes, i think the issue is that meteoblue only provides 3d data of clouds. Not the waterdroplets it self. Maybe i’m wrong about that. The rain is rendered in the sim i bet and i think that rain should be picked up in real time in our radar systems in the sim in real time. They need to both render the rain in the radar and in the environment at the same time i bet. To make that happen. Like we have two weather simulations at the same time. One in the radar and one in the environment and those needs to be in sync.
They have those bitmaps of rain though. It means they have some data where the 2d rain is located. But if they had that in 3d i bet we would already have that in the sim.
Really though? I just loaded a flight over Malaysia in thunderstorm conditions in c152 and got this. I couldn’t even start the flight before the plane was demolished. I just saw huge hits in the wind screen, and bam!
Well, have never experienced dangerous up and downdrafts in TS in this sim.
Well, hope they get that radar realistic. But i found the weather it self more important.
Radar is important. But above all, when will it finally rain without heavy fog? They finally have to change that. Very important!!! Just because it’s raining a little doesn’t mean it always looks like the end of the world. Hopefully that needs to be changed.
Nice suggestion. We’ve had a few days with some pretty significant rain during the daytime but without any fog which usually doesn’t come into play until later in the evening and after the sun sets.
I’m not on the avionics beta, but I am using the latest v0.12.14 WT CJ4 mod and it has what looks like functioning weather radar yesterday.
Thanks for that … I sprayed water into my PC and it just made a big flash and then died 
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Please read back through the thread - that “radar” is simply a 2-dimensional bitmap image that depicts precipitation around the aircraft without specifying altitude. However, it is not an accurate reproduction of actual aircraft weather radar, which scans 3-dimensional space ahead of the aircraft and provides the ability to “look” both above and below the current altitude of the aircraft to create an accurate volumetric display of precipitation.
tl;dr: that’s a very simplified, “dumbed down” display, in no way representative of real aircraft weather radar.
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ok thanks for clarifying. Wasn’t sure if it had been recently updated. It did seem to be representative of weather I was envountering even if only a 2D bitmap.
Yes, but that is not simulated. Thats real water
Well, i know it needs some data. But i think that data needs to be processed in the sim in real time.
I’m not sure how they will do that though.
And i would like the weather in the sim feel like weather before they focus on the weather radar. but i also know our opinions are not same. Maybe they can do both at the same time 
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In the sense of MSFS being a platform; I think the team wouldn’t be focusing on building the weather radar though (unless they will add it to the default aircraft in a more advanced form, than currently available and possibly as explained above with 3D scanning) but build/open in/the technology from meteoblue that allows such radars to work - so indeed, the weather features - core need to reach a certain point before this is possible, then 3rd party (and MSFS) could build them.
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Here is what PMDG said about the weather radar’s development in a recent interview.
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Just watched the portion. Nothing earth shattering or new info. They can’t do anything until Asobo does anything and Asobo can’t do anything until they have their talks with MB, which if my hunch is correct, within the next few days or before the end of the month, there should be some announcement about that. Moving forward, it did sound like Randazzo confirmed or hinted or maybe just the way he worded it that Asobo is either working on or has plans to create their own weather engine. This confirms what I gathered from the last Q and A back in December. Their talk about having a slider to manipulate the turbulence levels told me they were already working on something. MB just gives the data. Asobo can do whatever they want with it on the sim end of things. So there’s your answer. We’ll probably see a weather engine from Asobo with WXR tailored to use MB data following shortly after.
I did see Perry typing and stop to see what I was going to say. ;p
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