If Asobo take hand on this problem please add distant lightnings by the way. Lightnings are visible from far distance in the air.
I think distance is a big part of the problem. Whenever I have witnessed this, there are always clouds in the distance. The problem is the lightning doesn’t stay in the vicinity of those distant clouds. The pictures I took a few pages up did have clouds on the horizon, and a very few puffy white clouds closer to me. At one point a lightning bolt show horizontally across my screen. I never caught it’s origin, but it could have been over 40 miles away.
At this point I would be happy with a weather toggle button to disable all lightning (similar to the button to disable all icing).
I would rather have no lightning anywhere ever than have lightning pop up at random with clear skies and no lightning forecast or observed in the real world.
Until Asobo can figure out a way to implement lightning properly, it is not all that difficult but it would be a lot of work.
In principle:
- Use Meteoblue forecasts to predict lightning probability for each area at each time.
- Based on that probability data decide where and when to randomly spawn a thunderstorm as well as the severity of the thunderstorm.
- When a thunderstorm is spawned it needs to be a single object with various attributes and a life cycle. It should start from a towering cumulus and depict all the well known stages of a thunderstorm, including gradual cloud build up and later dissipation while spawning lightning, rain, turbulence, and up and down drafts at the proper life cycle stages and in the proper location relative to the cloud build up.
The drawback of this is that it will not match METAR data. I still maintain that there is no possible way to match thunderstorm location with METAR data and have realistic weather behavior so Asobo should not even try. By the time a METAR reports a thunderstorm over a particular airport a) it is too late to create a new thunderstorm that will go through its life cycle to reach the mature stage when the METAR reports it and b) the thunderstorm is already moving away anyway since METAR reports have a certain delay to them.
1 Like
This is what Flight Simulator appears to be using to to control the lightning switch:
CAPE is a measure of atmospheric instability. It can help show where conditions are favorable for thunderstorm development. However, it does not show where storms actually are. If you pick an airport in the colored areas on this map, and there are clouds there, you’re going to have thunder and lightning in the sim.
It’s been like this since Live Weather lightning was introduced last year.
Chicago and St. Louis for example, both have thunderstorms right now in the sim (note thunderstorm conditions at top right):
The clouds producing the lightning are so paltry that you can actually see the stars through them.
The problem is that there are currently no storms at all in the Midwest. Current radar:
Pick an airport outside the colored areas on Meteoblue’s CAPE plot, and there’s no lightning in the sim. Fargo for example (note cloudy conditions at top right):
Maybe this is helpful in planning a flight if you want to try to avoid it, or helpful to those who want to understand the problem.
A potential fix using existing Meteoblue data would be to use their convective cloud base, height, and extent plot:
Set the voxel based Live Weather in the simulator to actually draw clouds at those locations of that depth.
And then only turn on the lightning switch in areas where there’s also precip and CAPE values above a certain threshold:
Then there’d be no thunder in St. Louis or Chicago, just like it is in real life.
9 Likes
Since live tracking of lightning strikes already exists (see above) wouldn’t it possible to source that somehow via an API? That would be a way to only show lightning in the sim where it truly happens.
Of course that would probably require a new partnership and costs that may not be feasible.
2 Likes
Definitely possible. Looks like it’s missing parts of the globe though and would require quite a bit of filtering and finesse to integrate with the other weather data sources in the sim.
I wouldn’t expect Asobo to put in the effort for that, but a third party could… if Microsoft and Asobo would open the weather system to developers. Their contract with Meteoblue might prevent them from doing this.
There are lots of superior data sources available depending on where you fly. Visibility, for example, is not implemented in Live Weather yet, but is supposed to come next year. Compare Meteoblue’s visibility plot for the Seattle area (top) vs. the High Resolution Rapid Refresh for the Seattle area (bottom):
It’ll be nice to have that feature in Live Weather, but I’m kind of bummed seeing how rough and lacking in features (like the marine layer) Meteoblue’s data is.
2 Likes
By the time a lightning strike happens it is too late to start building a thunderstorm cloud. The way lightning and thunderstorms were handled in legacy third party weather tools was horrible, with mature thunderstorms gradually fading into view based on METAR thunderstorm data. Doing the same thing based on lightning trackers would result in the same problem.
1 Like
Some numerical forecast models already do lightning plots:
Another fix would be for Asobo to go and ask Meteoblue to create a lightning specific parameter (like the above shown) on their forecast model. Then Asobo wouldn’t have to do anything except plug this value directly in the simulator’s lightning slider on the weather preset menu.
It would be amazing if you could change the weather data source though. Flying with 3km HRRR based weather instead of Meteoblue’s 30km NMM would be like going from autogen scenery to photogrammetry.
1 Like
I don’t think Asobo are short of data - MeteoBlue has an absolute wealth - it’s just that MSFS’s interpretation of it is way off.
The fact that no [BUG LOGGED] is appended to the title of this thread, which is now 6 months old, makes it seem that the issue is not yet on Asobo’s (weather) radar. I’ve noticed the lightening frequency is less than SU5 but its still happening when it clearly (literally) shouldn’t be.
It is on their radar, as it’s in their feedback snapshots. They didn’t start working on the bug yet however.
Please Asobo just give us an option to disable lightning, the sim is totally unusable for PilotEdge and Vatsim. Its been over a year and this problem still exists. What was even the point of the Vatsim partnership???
3 Likes
St. Petersburg, FL KPIE I don’t see the lightning so much as hear the thunder with few clouds. Annoying and unrealistic. Thank you in advance for correcting.
1 Like
I agree, too much lightning and too much rainbow !
1 Like
Yes, Yes…way too many rainbows too.
2 Likes
Lighting and thunder with partly cloudy skies at KTOL this morning. Fired up the sim after a little break and am (not) surprised to see all the bugs are in-fact still intact, plus, I can’t select fuel tanks and the G530 unit I bought is useless because popping out a screen locks me at 15fps. I’ve held off on complaining for a year, but what an absolute joke.
I think it used to be even worse around SU2 or so and a bug was logged and at least improved months later. But I think it has deteriorated again and maybe Asobo still considers it fixed.
Madness at New Haven
2 Likes
Why is the bug still not identified by Asobo?