Lightning in mostly sunny skies

After the patch, decided to try the 787 out from KMIA to KJFK. Plane is acting better so far but whats up with the constant and annoying lightning and thunder in mostly sunny skies? This is something new.

Down here in Georgia, we are having some stormy weather also. I could hear thunder and the clouds were scattered/broken. Real world is overcast but that layer did not appear in the sim.

Release notes say that lightning should now work in Live Weather. Maybe they have added it and dialed it up a bit too far?

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I was taxing in Miami when I noticed it the most, had a few random pops departing northeast of Miami. I am currently probably 300 miles east off the coast of Georgia and its starting again. I think its just dialed up a little too much.

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I’m currently over the Black Sea on my way to Moldova. Dark clouds and lightning!

Same here, few clouds and a lot of lightnings!
And AP stays 200ft lower than designated altitude. New bugs…

I wonder what the source is for lightning being produced in the sim. I’m starting to think they have over complicated the weather system and using METAR’s would have been better.

Same problem. Started immediately when first tried 1.9.3.

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“Lightning have been added when applicable” :man_shrugging:

Yea, unfortunately added also when not applicable. :smile:

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Probably not. Palm Beach METAR:

|Ceiling:|3500 feet AGL|
|Clouds:| scattered clouds at 2500 feet AGL
broken clouds at 3500 feet AGL|
|Weather:|VCTS (thunderstorm in vicinity)|

Sim draws a couple layers of scattered and broken clouds, throws thunder on top of it without any rain or info the on the tops. That’s pretty much what it’s doing in the area now lol:

Regardless of the source it’s using to pull lightning data, the sim needs to likewise add some deep convection cumulonimbus at these locations with lightning. Looks like they might have just assumed the weather model would already do this, but it fails in certain situations like airmass thunderstorms.

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yea… I think they may have over done it with lightning.

I’m in clear skies with the most minimalist amount of clouds scattered about. They more look like smudges from dirty fingers on my screen then actual rendered clouds, but still enough, they are producing lightning nonstop.

I was flying around storms in the Kobe area of Japan around 8pm UTC yesterday. I used blitzortung to confirm that lightning was present in the area which some was. The scene was a little more convincing with cloud tops at 30,000ft and above although they looked amorphous over a wide area and not the CB style when you select storms as a manual weather theme. I wish I’d taken the time to find local satellite and radar to compare this in a little more detail.

Playing around with manual weather in the hope to give some idea of what is going on, I’ve noticed a couple of things.

Cb’s (Specifically of the incus variety) aren’t really modelled. In the storm theme it uses three cloud layers to create that looks something like a CB. You can extend a single cloud layer to 60000ft and it never hits any kind of tropopause. Haven’t seen a real world weather scenario that recreates the CB’s from this theme yet.

Second, which may give some pointers to the Florida example is that coverage affects cloud top height. (See screenshot) This may explain why areas with well scattered storms aren’t modelled so well.

Edit: The first screenshot has the coverage slider at around 10%

This is hilarious and super sad at the same time, considering all other bugs.

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Same issue here after 1.9.3. As soon as I started up on Cape Cod, lightning, lightning everywhere. It was cloudy and low visibility but no lightning reported in the area IRL.

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Please vote this up, I don’t complain about the sim much, but this is super annoying lol Plus I was only getting a “few clouds” and lightning during a rain storm last night, with no rain.

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Will vote up. Though the weather and lightning simulation is quite accurate on my side and my part of the world, the lightning is happening way too often for even a regular thunderstorm.

It’s not just the planes that are haunted now, the sky is too!
:+1:

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Yeah i was zapped by the lightning of Zeus all the way along the Coast of Amalfi. The first thunder almost took me out if my chair… some small scattered clouds and sunshine it felt like a heavy rain and thunder orchestra monsoon style. But only few small scattered clouds and sunshine… what is happening? I begin to suspect after patch 3 that MS FS and me could become a complicated love affair.

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Yep, lightning in mostly sunny skies here, too.