Lightning intensity

Same here around the Nashville area. Plenty of lightning (but not excessive) on my flight from Nashville Intl (KBNA) to Outlaw (KCKV), so the fix mentioned in the v1.5.7.0 release notes is working on my PC.

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Above my house (near LFLC), there are lightning flashes in the clouds every 1-3 seconds for at least 20 minutes, and it’s not over yet.
So, well, the lightning intensity might have been realistic.

It’s exactly like in this video, but without the ground lightning strikes (or at least I haven’t seen any from my house).

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We had storms move through here a few days ago and looking out my window lightning was non stop for a good 10 minutes or so, with sheets of rain. I didn’t see any ground strikes either.

So there will be times we will see what appears to be excessive lightning in the sim, even though it isn’t, if the sim is picking up weather data correctly.

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I feel like the cloud to ground lightning strikes at up to 80 per minute in severe storms is pretty accurate.

However, cloud to cloud lightning usually happens more frequently than that. In which case the amount of lightning flashes might be a little low now. I’ve seen thunderstorms that light up the sky more than it does now.

So if that 80 strikes per minute is taking both cloud to ground and cloud to cloud lightning into account, the lightning has gone too far in the opposite direction.

I mean going from 1000 to 80 is pretty drastic to begin with. I mean that’s a 92% decrease, that’s way too much.

Incredible storm with towering cumulous east of Jacksonville right now. Lightning looks great to me.

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Lightning flashes can be visible from much more than a hundred miles away, and with a large convective system, indeed there can be many flashes per second across a region. In my travels I’ve seen a couple systems that literally looked like high frequency strobe lights, usually big summertime derechos in the upper Midwest. There was way more lightning than even 1.5.4.0 was showing. That’s on the extreme side of the spectrum though.

Flight Simulator on the other hand, looks like it’s fairly limited in how far it will draw lightning. So most of the lightning is happening in pretty close proximity. It also seems quite limited on what type of lightning it will draw, most of it is emanating out of the cloud with big visible channels. In reality, most of these flashes are intracloud flashes where you’d just see the cloud light up, and most of them are going to be many miles away. In the vast majority of realistic situations, you’re not going to have big visible lightning channels zig zagging all around your plane at close range. There are some exceptional events of course, but I’d expect Flight Simulator to tend toward the norm on a given flight, not the extreme.

If the sim can’t draw distant lightning and draws mostly cloud to ground lightning, then this seems like a pretty good compromise: reducing the number of local flashes, even if big systems have a much higher frequency over a much larger area.

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Now that lightning is mostly fixed. Now they need to fix/add turbulence within the storm clouds. But that’s a different topic altogether.

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I’ve also noticed that the depiction of storms in general seems more accurate for USA locations than it does for UK/Europe in the sim where they rarely seem to be depicted. Hopefully this is something they can work on.

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It’s always the same: one step forward, people complain, two steps back…
I should have downloaded the beta 1.5.4.0 to enjoy the lightning for those almost two weeks.

Going from 1000 to 80 is a 92% reduction, that’s far from a minor tweak.
And I don’t know if Microsoft/Asobo distinguish between cloud-to-cloud lightning (which is much more frequent) and cloud-to-ground lightning.

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Flew in Switzerland today and lighting looked good. Let’s stay positive and focused on facts everyone. Maximize the signal to noise.

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Some pretty intense thunderstorms over the Adriatic and Croatia way right now and haven’t seen a single flash of lightning in MSFS :frowning:

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Checking now.

Can confirm that the precipitation is a bit further north than what’s real, however I am able to see lighting in this area.

Are you in SU3 Beta?

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I’m flying on it and I have to say it’s very nice and it works…but the lighting is missing and the lightning just looks like a straight white line… this is what I saw and it happens during the day obviously…

I was around this area earlier to looking for this storm which was showing on meteo blue and another app , not a flash I’m afraid either .

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I also then checked further north (by Trieste) where there is no lighting reported but equally strong precipitation and the sim correctly depicted no lightening.

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Now we need to get them to fix the lack of humidity and unlimited visibility that has been sitting since 2020 release! And more cloud depictions!

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Was working well last night, when I approached MPSM. I doubt that they turned off thunderstorms today, because of feedback in this thread.

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That sounds more like the thunderstorm prediction isn’t working correctly, which, according to the patch notes, were supposed to be improved. Might be worth filing a bug report about that, if there isn’t such a thread already.

Flyinyg from KDPA to KMKE tonight and the thunderstorms closely matched the weather radar. At least it was close enough for my expectations. The intensity varied nicely, too.

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Looks like there has been a regression with 1.5.10.0, I’m having hundreds of lightning per minute again.

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