Live Weather Does Not Match

Definitely working again in North America this morning!

1 Like

I have REX aswell but honestly, i prefer the MSFS weather. REX is not that accurate over a whole flight. You can have overcast and nothing but clouds around you, 5 mins later its CAVOK. It breaks the immersion and only renders the weather kind-of correct around the airport it takes the metar from. So far, flying in europe, the MSFS weather and the pressures is very close to the real world from my experience.
Especially the pressures. As i fly on VATSIM only, so far the MSFS pressures were always correct, or off by 1hg/in.

3 Likes

Yeah I have REX too but have hardly used it. The issue I have with REX is it only injects ‘themes’ so if CAVOK is reported the full sim is CAVOK, if overcast the full sim is overcast etc. With the built in live weather although it’s not always spot on I like how I can see and approach weather systems.

1 Like

exactly this. And this is by far worse than the MSFS weather. Its such a wast of money IMHO.
Always have used REX in older sims but for MSFS it is definitely not the better option of the two we have…

2 Likes

I think as we rely on more cloud services to flight sim / game … the Trust model certainly needs to be that a lot of companies use in the business world…

i.e. there needs to be a service to let us know the status of the individual components

1 Like

Hey all,

I just posted a topic about a hack to get live weather accuracy back, you may want to check it out!

Daylight saving time is also not spot on. In the sim it was red and almost dark at 19:00 in western europe while IRL it was still very bright outside.

I am finding I am getting far better results and consistency with “unreal-weather-live-metar”, than with the Asobo “Real Weather”. At least if I call up an airport Metar, the weather at that airport now matches the Metar, which is the same as the current RW Metar for that airport.

2 Likes

One thing to bear in mind with MSFS.

MSFS seems to be injecting the ATIS wind speed at 1000ft, and the halving it at ground level.
THIS IS SO WRONG !!

ATIS, ASOS, AWOS informatiuon about wind is measured at ground level (or on Towers), NOT at 1000ft.

In MSFS, a pilot on the ground gets ATIS wind information, say in a Cessna, with a 20 knot crosswind. proabably way beyond his ability to land or even take off.

But MSFS has made the GROUND winds 50% of that ATIS value – ie 10 knots

But its a SIM, so they try, and Guess what, its not so bad … “BOY are they GOOD” – they now think they they can and take off in a 20 knot direct crosswind … but in fact, they were doing so in a 10 knot crosswind,

Then it does not help that MSFS’s ATIS appears to being giving that Wind speed in ft/sec and not Knots !!

This was the case in the initial relase, but it got fixed long ago.

Are you sure…

I enter winds of 270 @ 20 into the Weather Ground UI, and on the ground I get 270 @ 10

Atis then tell me winds are 270 @ 17 ( Note 17 ft/sec = 10 knots !!)

Plane tells me winds are 50% of what got entered ( have to enter at least 80 knots to get a 40 knot to get an active indication showing on the Airspeed Indicator).

Does NOT look fixed to me

1 Like

The half wind bad-feature/intentional-bug was fixed in Live Weather months ago, but it’s still an issue using preset weather. And probably an issue in METAR injectors too since they are also using weather presets.

Thank you – that makes perfect sense… so live data is injecting the live weather in correctly without the 50% fudge factor – but maybe ATIS is still reporting winds in units of ft/sec ??

The Preset issue is easily compensated for by the users - (assuming they are aware of it)… and I assume one day, within the next 10 years, it may get fixed, before the server switches are thrown.

Yes. As far as I can tell, the simulator is attempting to modulate the winds based on surface friction and terrain. It doesn’t make sense to do this with Live Weather since the numerical forecast model is already computing the effects of friction and terrain in the boundary layer. At least at the scale of the weather model (30 km grid cell). The simulator may still want to perturb the winds around local terrain features and buildings within these grid cells, but arbitrarily halving the winds would interfere with and badly double down on what the model is already doing.

For the preset weather, the UI value should be the end result after modulation, not the input value into the calculation. I’m guessing this is a conflict of two different features: the Weather UI settings, and the terrain based wind vectors.

Keep in mind that fixing the winds at the surface results in them being broken at pattern altitude. So you can wind up with extreme wind shear when attempting to practice strong crosswind landings. The winds are problematic in many areas, however. For example, the weathervaning effect on take-off that makes some planes nearly uncontrollable. The Milviz Corsair will nose over on to its back when loaded at a parking spot with a 20 knot tail wind. And apparently sudden transitions in the wind, probably between grid cells, or the transition from METAR to model based weather, can trigger an overstress crash.

1 Like

Wait. Do you know that live weather doesn’t halve the wind at ground level, or are you assuming it’s not because it wouldn’t make sense for it to do so? I’m not trying to attack you or anything. It’s a genuine question.

1 Like

I would prefer to know what the wrong weather is, rather than have Live weather, and not know what it is !!!

Therefore, untill such time that this makes more sense to me, I prefer to use a metar Injection of weather, where I can see the metar that is meant to be being injected (real time, real world metar from a non MSFS source), and then make a judgement of the sim appears to be depicting this.

I can check winds by reading simconnect values, and can visually check the sky.

So far, this seems to be giving me more understandably result, that relying on some data comming form the MSFS servers, that are based on some model, that may or may not be up to date, and also may or may not be represented by the metars I am getting “real world”.

may not be how the system has been designed by MS/ASOBO, but it works better for me than what is in effect “Real random Weather”

I’ve done a lot of checks using the avionics reported wind value, and it often matches either the NEMS model or the METAR observation (when Live Weather is working that is).

However, the avionics always report half of the value set in the weather preset menu. You should see similar results using SimConnect.

1 Like

Yeah, I think it just depends on what type of flying you do. IFR into larger airports, it makes more sense to just use METARs at the field and some winds aloft. But Flight Simulator should already be doing this: injecting the latest METAR observation at the field instead of using the forecast model. The METAR is only used to set the temp, winds, and pressure though. Clouds are still coming from the model.

I’m a VFR bushpilot at heart, so the METAR injectors are pretty much worthless to me as they don’t simulate enroute localized and dynamic weather.

1 Like

With Metar injection by “unreal-weather-live-metar” it looks like the clouds are being derived from the Metar, and I have witnessed some very nice “SMOOTH” weather transitions over a reasonably long flight.

Everyone has differing uses and expectation from MSFS, and I find the forum interesting to see what some of those different requirements are.
My primary use of MSFS is as a practice tool, for CRM, as well as to get familiar with some of the GPS systems I may or may not use in RL.

The Scenery Eye Candy is nice, but most of my flights are under IMC, so what is more important to me is a realistic Sim Cockpit … not necessarily faithful to an one particular aircraft.

All this discussion and I don’t see a single mention of how we still don’t have proper visibility settings in sim? Aerosol density is always zero in live weather. Live weather is not factoring things like humidity to generate haze and reduce visibility. How can you people keep flying in cavok without noticing this ? It’s either clouds on the ground or cavok situation…

1 Like