Hi,
Thank you! Could you kindly edit your post and give the time (and specify Zulu or local) where this took place?
The CAPE hypothesis is very interesting.
When I’m setting up a flight and I DONT see the lightning picture when I click Live weather it feels good.
Thanks. I updated the post with the zulu times of most recent metars at the time
22:56 Zulu
10/14/21
SBMT São Paulo Brazil
S23°30.40’ / W46°38.03’
Live Weather
METAR SBMT 142200Z 31010KT 9999 SCT015 BKN040 OVC070 20/17 Q1014 RERA
I live near this airport.
Ingame at the moment is a real lightning storm. Several per minute.
Meanwhile, in reality, I have neither heard nor seen lightning all day.
And it’s always like that, the lightning storm happens as soon as a cloud appears or a drizzle starts.
It’s important to say that this problem is not place-specific, wherever I go it happens. It’s incredibly annoying
This sounds very plausible.
Yes it seems cloud thickness and altitude are not taken into account. Easy to test with preset weather, just set lightning to 100% and add a thin cloud layer. Lightning will occur.
Honestly lightning is present EVERYWHERE, any tiny cloud produces it (sometimes even when I see no clouds around), when it should be produced majoritarely by cummulusnimbus, also I’ve never been blinded by lightning while flying IRL even at night (altho I’m sure it might occur in very direct exposure situations), in the sim it blinds you even during the day
Pic to ilustrate
If that would be possible IRL we would never dare to go out and swim. It could be thunderstorms anytime
Cool pic. Can you help the dev team to try and reproduce the conditions by including the requested info?
Hi folks,
I postetd this already in my “I will crawl from Saxony to Gironde on my knees for sunglasses in VR” thread but I remember that comment by the Pilot (respect!) about lightnings under daylight conditions and that they are barely visible. It’s from 14.00min onward.
So hey Asobo, you dont have to believe in us but please listen at the pro’s.
Nice tbm940 video: Flieger-Ikone Margrit Waltz hat einen lebensgefährlichen Job | auslandsjournal - YouTube
Its in german, use subtitles for translation.
Moderator Edit: This post was consolidated into this master topic.
The constant lightning in Asia is driving me absolutely mental. No matter how LITTLE cloud there is, it never stops, EVER.
The fact that there is no tracked bug for this that ever gets addressed in the Live Q&A is insane. Fix this crap already.
Can confirm this bug, been flying about 80% of my flight hours in Asia and always, ALWAYS have lightning. Please fix this.
1200 Australian Eastern Standard Time
19 October 2021
YMTO Monto, Queensland Australia
24.86S, 151.12E
Live Weather
Lightning coming from those clouds, unrealistic.
I’ve seen some discussion about CAPE so here is the chart for the above post
I was approaching from the south, the lightning did not start until I was almost at YMTO, indicated by the blue dot. I would say about where the purple shading starts.
The blue/purple areas depict CAPE of only a couple hundred J/kg, and it would be unlikely for r/w lightning producing thunderstorms to form in those locations. But based on many tests I have done in the last week by using the MB CAPE map to select airports to spawn at, it definitely appears that the current logic in Live Weather is to generate lightning if any amount of CAPE exists at all - even if the value is quite small.
If they simply set the threshold value higher - (say 1000 to 1500 J/kg), I think there would be a great improvement in the amount of spurious lightning occurring in places where it should not be happening.
I wasn’t checking Meteoblue’s CAPE predictions this storm season in central Europe so I don’t know how precise their NEMS model is.
But when I’m checking the GFS model, it’s not rare to have CAPE higher than 2000 J/kg in the summer.
The problem is that we don’t know what modification of the CAPE index the NEMS model uses. The GFS uses surface based CAPE (SBCAPE). That’s the worst kind of CAPE to predict storms with.
It’s obvious that the surface will be overheated in the summer, thus the CAPE values will be overblown.
So even if the CAPE is above 2000 J/kg, it doesn’t mean storms will form. I’ll say that most often they don’t. At least not here in the Czech Republic. There are more things to consider when forecasting storms, not only CAPE.
Usually even if the CAPE is this high in the summer, it means there’s a strong capping inversion. Maybe Meteoblue needs to use CIN (convective inhibition) as well, although it’s not that straightforward. There are situations with strong capping inversions that are “blown through” in the evening - see the “loaded gun sounding.”
Using MLCAPE (mixed layer CAPE) is much, much better because it does what it says - it takes into account the mixing of the boundary layer during the day. The SBCAPE can be above 2000 J/kg, while the MLCAPE only gives around 500 J/kg.
When there are night storms predicted, we use MUCAPE (most unstable CAPE), because the layer is not mixed and is almost everytime elevated. MUCAPE gives us the highest possible value in the vertical profile.
So first thing to adjust would be the use of MLCAPE. Maybe Meteoblue’s NEMS is already using it, but we don’t know that because it doesn’t say so at their weather maps.
Second thing would be to only include lightning if there are sufficiently vertically thick clouds (that could be fairly easy, because they already have weather data aloft together with temperatures - they know where the freezing level and tropopause is), or double check it with weather radar observations (that would be hard because I doubt Asobo would be able to check the weather radar data around the world).
Also saw lightning now flying around Texas with only a few clouds in the sky. Deffo a bug
Nice to see this problem hasn’t been fixed in the new update. I have lighting in Texas all the time when in the sim, no matter what the conditions are. Funny seeing lighting and hearing thunder when the weather is CAVOK!
Hey all,
I really hope this is true but the latest update lists excessive lightning as being fixed in sim update 7 and 8