Initialization hour is when the forecast was made, the time at which the model was run. Meteoblue’s model is updated twice a day at 12 UTC and 00 UTC. It takes about five and a half hours for Meteoblue to finish running the model and for the forecast to get published online. So you won’t actually see those forecasts until 1730 UTC and 530 UTC, assuming everything goes as planned.
I’m seeing the forecast for 12 UTC in Flight Simulator, which is the same time the model was run, or the 0-hour forecast. I should have been seeing the 12-hour forecast instead.
But what the Meteoblue website shows as “current” on their NEMS GLOBAL weather maps, should also be what we see as “Live” in Flight Simulator. It should be using the same data. There should not be a 12+ hour discrepancy like I’m currently experiencing. Apparently not all users are experiencing this 12+ hour delay either, per this thread:
https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/using-meteoblue-to-understand-in-game-weather-an-expose/
If this bug is intermittent, or user specific, it would definitely account for why some people are claiming the weather is radically inaccurate, while others shrug and say it looks pretty good to them. Without any sort of timestamp on the forecast, we’d have no idea that Flight Simulator is incorrectly using old data.