Live Weather Does Not Match

ok…but since you’re using SF as one of your claims and I happen to live here, I can tell you that what you are describing isn’t accurate. Not saying it isn’t the case for SF but if you’re talking within the last 3-4 days, we had storms roll through that carried significant weather as well as isolated T-storms.

Perhaps! when I tried a few days ago it was a total mess, it didn’t even match the world map, but the clouds in game we’re towering dark monsters….the kind of clouds we came to know after su 7, in fact that area for me (and I know two more people who have tested that area in the past as well ) as often be so bad that I have used it only for testing purposes, as well as Taiwan, Japan and Dublin. Because some times these areas can differ from each other’s, some good and some bad. So every time someone says here “the weather has improved over the last few days” they might be correct for that one flight, but then I go and try those 4 countries to see if the towering is still happening, so then I know that nothing has changed and that users are just being lucky, as we all know, since the weather in game is inconsistent! Taiwan is 95% a total mess most of the time…

You forget accumulated snow. Just because it is currently above freezing temperature does not mean that there is no snow on the ground.

That is correct. The thing is if they would make the snow melt as soon as it’s above 0 it would behave more unrealistic. As soon as temp is above 1 degree the snow suddenly dissapears. And i bet it’s hard to messure the snow depth all over the world. And i think that snow coverage doesn’t update that often. Should they remove that then? Are we more happy with no snow coverage at all. I bet that would be their fix. I’ve seen they remove or complelty change things we complain about before.

I wouldn’t care that much if they removed that compared to the changes they made to the atmospheric behaviour in su7 though. Is the snow coverage also important for VATSIM users? I flying in the sim and i pretend that is the real world i’m flying in. If snow is on the ground then that is the weather i have in the sim. To me the behaviour is more important. For example the snow on roads but not on the grass. It’s the opposite how it works. We are plowing the snow from the roads not from the grass to the roads.

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What the hell is this supposed to represent?
By the way, the “eye” in the left “structure” is EDDH where there is currently CAVOK. Just like in all Northern Germany. And these hideous things appear out of nowhere and disappear just like that.

It really is a disease. It makes me sick to see what they did with this game.:face_vomiting: :face_vomiting: :face_vomiting: :face_vomiting:

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What you are reporting is related to METAR implementation METAR keeps disrupting the weather/ bugged weather/Cumulus/CB clouds only/no medium to high cloud coverage
Forcing 2 different models (MB forecast + METAR) to co-exist is generating this kind of situation, there no way to avoid it if they don’t implement an option to disable METAR integration: Live Weather - Toggle options (enable/disable) for METAR based weather injections

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This tool: Metar Lookup » Microsoft Flight Simulator allows for METAR to no longer be necessitated IMO for needing to affect the weather.

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I bet those complained it didn’t match METAR wanted the weather in the sim to be as METAR says because it’s a report of weather even if it’s less detailed. Thats why we can’t get more advanced weather systems in flight simulators in the future. We are stuck with this. As soon as the weather is different than a METAR it’s not called simulated weather in a flight sim community. It’s called random/fantasy weather for those that like eye candy.

Now we can only hope to get improved “interpolation”

Thats not what i expected to see as improvements when i bought this sim 2020.

I now complain the weather doesn’t match what we were advertised it should match (Meteoblue).

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What I am saying though is there is now a tool, there were other ways anyways, that can search any METAR field you want. Now we can do away with it being an in game option.

This particular case could be solved by changing the way the METAR interpretation works.
If a METAR reports CAVOK, the sim should look for the variables of the weather outside of the METAR bubble as well and then simply take over the cloud and visibility cover from the surrounding areas as long as that still means that the visibility is greater than 10 miles and there are no clouds below 10.000 ft.

The issue is that when a METAR reports clouds. How does it know how thick the layer should be? It’s a guess. And will be generic looking layer all the time a METAR reports clouds. I know some accept the generic look to be able to have it as METAR. And that is fine by me as long as they had implemented that as an optional thing.

The biggest problem is that without METAR we do miss localized phenomena like fog.
That was one of the biggest letdowns on one of my first IFR flights 2 years ago, when I was flying into Tenerife North with a reported fog layer in the METAR and the forecast model of METEOBLUE had no way of predicting this correctly and therefore I came in to the nicest clear weather with absolutely no visibility issues.
The METAR implementation fixed this deficiency.

For sure it did, but why the complete overhaul to implement that simple foglayer they added? Can’t understand that. Could have just added a simple toggle for that metar layer. No blending required to implement that. A fog layer should make it harder to localise the airport but in the sim it makes it easier. In the center of the fog you know for sure the airport are located.

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METAR introduced more issues than improvements, this is called a regression. I don’t understand if the balance was negative between pros and cons why they decided to release that functionality. They should have kept it as a beta functionality for the ones that wanted to test it and if they succeeded to resolve all issues and having a better experience with Live weather than pre-SU7, then only at that condition release it to all.

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Missing fog vs. changing the entire way weather is used and depicted, yeah I could do without fog.

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100% true, thats how improvments are made. When it’s better than previous version. The fog for example may be accurate to METAR but really really far from realistic. It’s not even dynamic. It’s completely static.

Now after su7 suddenly those asked for METAR “blending” are just happy if it matches those METARS. No higher expectations than that. Why did they even want to have the blending? it’s no point have it blended if they need the weather to match a METAR 100%. Blending only creates a mess. Without blending and METAR as an optional feature both type of users would enjoy the sim. Now maybe those asked for METAR are a bit more happy but the weather doesn’t match neither METAR or Meteoblue 100%. And it’s also impossible to give constructive feedback when we don’t know what should match what and when.

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How much more pathetic does Asobos live weather system have to be for them to make a change? I bought this sim based on what they showed in the weather discovery series not this nonsense

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You do UNDERSTAND the even though a metar shows rain listed that rain might have stopped and that the METAR isn’t reflective of the CURRENT conditions. Rain comes and goes and METARS are often behind the ball. A METAR isn’t going to reflect every time the rain starts and stops, especially if it changes every 5/10 minutes. I mean holy **** people. Sitting at STL earlier today the rain stopped and started about 3 times in 30 minutes as bands moved through, should the METAR have changed between bands and when bands started, no. Did the real world METAR change 6 times in 30 minutes, no.

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If these issues bother you so much even though it has been discussed over and over about the timeline for changes to occur , there’s always P3D/FSX/XP. I’m sure changing back to those will no doubt solve your issues, right?

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The caps seem a bit unnecessary. I think we can all be a bit more civilized than that.

I’m generally fascinated by what seems to be an odd campaign to discredit METARs.

I don’t generally like being a resume guy, but in this case, I think it’s a matter of credibility.

I’ve flown, military, general, and airline aviation for about 35 years now. I’ve read thousands of METARs, TAFs, etc.

And the number of times I’ve come across an ATIS/METAR that was wildly inaccurate, I could probably count on one hand.

Does the weather change over the course of the hour interval? Of course it does. Is this generally captured by the next hourly report (if not changed via a SPECI)? Of course it is. And the more profound the change, the more likely the reported weather is to be changed.

Moreover, as I’ve said, the TAF/ATIS is the legal weather at the field (unless the FAA has issued an Exemption/OPSPEC for another weather source).

The FAA takes that very seriously. Trust me on that one! :rofl:

But this discussion largely circumscribes the point.

The issue isn’t that the METAR says OVC003 1SM RA and there currently is no rain in the sim.

The issue is that the METAR says the above, and it’s 2000ft and scattered in the sim. Or worse, 1/4 mile in haze or clouds so low that you can’t fly the approach.

And this is not a matter of the weather drifting from the hourly report as a display of how dynamic it is.

It’s a matter of how inaccurately the current sim weather model portrays the actual current weather.

This is not how real world aviation works, and I suspect why simmers lobbied for a more accurate weather depiction.

Now people may not like how Asobo has integrated this. I’m one of them.

But denigrating the accuracy of METARs, the actual weather reports used by actual pilots, is probably not the solution to getting more accurate weather into the sim.

I understand that this is a matter that some folks here are passionate about.

But, in the unlikely event that some dev actually reads these threads, I don’t want it to be unstated that some simmers still want to have in sim weather that at least resembles actual weather.

And, despite that segment becoming something of the “them” in this thread, I don’t think there really needs to be an argument supporting why accurate weather would be a virtue in MSFS.

Now I know that this discussion is going to go on until the release of MSFS 2030, and being the Internet, I will have successfully changed exactly zero people’s minds. But I felt that this discussion was getting a bit lopsided, and at least a little inaccurate. So I thought it important to at least present the other side a bit.

Anyway, I hope that this gets all sorted out a bit and that the devs add the, much requested, toggle so that everyone can have the sim experience that they are looking for.

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