Yes, but it also shows that adding METAR doesn’t make the weather more realistic or believable. I know for sure there isn’t a circle of rain around those airports IRL like a POI marker.
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LOL, just based on that alone I can’t believe anyone who is a relatively serious simmer like those people on VATSIM thought METARS was a needed addition. Rather than actually improving the weather, they just wanted a way to pull weather info up in the sim. It had nothing to do with weather or its accuracy or improvements but more for their own convenience of being too lazy to look information up themselves. It’s embarrassing and unfortunately shafted everyone else. This was exactly how weather was back in FSX when you kept seeing repeated patterns and mirrored weather for multiple surrounding areas. History is doomed to repeat itself and we still haven’t learned.
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Are you sure it was just that, and not that they wanted the weather to exactly match, or close to, the METAR? And that the Meteoblue method wasn’t accurate enough?
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I would bet my sim career on it. I’ve explained it a few times before but the gist is that before having a model like MB, the ONLY method for getting live ANYTHING weather related was through the injection of METAR sources since that was the only thing available for public use. What this did was finally be able to create more ‘varied’ weather by plotting and adding these station points into FS. The problem was that since there are so many stations, you needed to find a way to create it so that only one station would affect the overall areas. Without that you’d have 30+ cloud layers and winds shifting every second because you’d have too many chefs in the kitchen. So, initially you’d have one predominant METAR that would be replicated to the smaller stations. Then they came up with the idea to ‘isolate’ or create the ‘bubble’. But to do that, they needed hard set ranges for how wide to cast. This allowed for airports to ‘accurately’ reflect their own life weather without affecting others. Problem is, weather is a blanket thing. It doesn’t care and respect the airspace of another airport. Yes, at different times, different airport will report different conditions. But if it’s weather we’re looking at, it needs to be viewed as ONE single thing and not something that can be pieced around and cut out station by station. Old habits die hard.
This is why the MB worked and looked amazing. It was ONE thing. Now with METAR we’ve literally poked holes into this one thing and these holes are the result in weather depiction. The ONLY way we’ve tried fixing this aside from removing it is by ‘blending’. All that does is hide the ugly hard ranges I mentioned early, smoke and mirrors. We want to talk about the METARS not matching, it’s because everything is being blended and forced together. Imagine walking on the ground where the temperature changes every 5 feet instead of a more natural spread out and gradual way. And to be blunt, to h e l l about needing METARS to be accurate. I want weather to be natural, flowable, and unpredictable, just like it is. Not shoving parameters to be adhered too. The whole point of forecasting is to ‘hope’ you got it right, isn’t that every bit of aviation, hope? METAR just makes everything absolute.
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Well explained i must say 
They should have added this METAR thing on top of the Meteoblue data as an optional feature only for those that needed it more accurate to those METAR without any kind of changes made to the raw meteoblue model we had at release. That would have made it enjoyable for all of the users i bet. Not blending two completely different sources.
Then they could have improved both types of weather without interfare the other.
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One idea that I think I’ve seen on here before was instead of blending real METAR data, the sim should report METAR’s based of it’s OWN Live Weather. Instead we get this Frankenstein MB/METAR situation.
And I’ll add that during that flight last night, there were almost CLEAR skies between those METAR weather areas. 
Another idea would be that in weather situations like above, where METARs are showing completely different weather to what the MB Live Weather model is showing, then the weather in between the METAR reporting stations should match/be similar to that weather, not completely clear skies. Now that would be “blending” 
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Thank you. I’ve explained it before on several occasions but many people for whatever reason still don’t understand how it works. I refuse to believe anybody asking these questions are using MSFS as their first simulator.
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I rather have clear skies. Adding that would make the Meteoblue weather we have completely useless and would make the sim weather be like those 3rd party addons that sets METAR globally.
To me blending means a mess. If blending were that good to create accurate weather with all of the forecasts would already be 100% accurate. METAR is the known/static past, forecasts predicts the unknown/dynamic future.
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That would cause issues if the sim METAR doesn’t match the real world METAR. Online ATC won’t be using the METAR you describe, but another source.
Then it’s up to online atc to adapt to the more realistic behaving weather in MSFS. And use those METAR that is an observation of the weather occuring in the sim. Thats how it works IRL. ATC uses observations to control the traffic. ATC do not control the weather.
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The complication for eg VATSIM is that they don’t just support MSFS; they support multiple simulators in a shared world, and each simulator may have its own way of approximating the real-world weather.
But hey, they chose that problem space to work in.
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Well, the thing is we had the option to choose METAR to be compatible with VATSIM near release already (REX not free, unreal weather free). Why turn the meteoblue weather we had into this metar thing too?
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Exactly what I was about to write. Doesn’t make much sense to work with METAR 1 for sim X, and METAR 2 for sim Y.
Asobo made their bed, now we have to sleep in it.
I liked that more advance “bed”.
Now it feels simple and outdated to be able to use VATSIM.
Well, i understand that flight simulator devs can’t create a more believable weather system because they are limited by older flight simulators.
But why not add that simple METAR weather as an optional feature?
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The annoying thing too, is that because the weather has been so strange here in California lately, they’ve been using oddball OPS lately. ATC has no idea about that. For example at SFO, they usually run the 28’s for arrivals and 01’s for departures. Because of the weather they’re using the 10’s for departures and the 19’s for arrivals. ATC can’t do that. When it used the one’s, all the arrivals just flew into the mountains. When they did use the 19’s both arrival and departures overloaded the runways and it was go around city with departures taking priority. One of the many reasons I switched to live or historic ADS-B solutions that don’t use the sim’s ATC.
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Lightning issue has been logged as well. As per my post, weather changes seem very promising for this next SU.
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Yes, really feels like they focus on weather now
In my opinion, one of the most important aspects of flight.
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What I find weird is that MSFS is indeed aware of the METAR, it is just not displaying it correctly. So it nothing to do with missing data, but rather with the sim being too incompetent (bad programming?) to convert the data.
Sometimes there is a “little loading” issue with live data - had this yesterday at EDDF - disable live weather using the weather toolbar options if you selected custom - otherwise in the settings and turn it back on again and after a little moment the live weather might load.
As of now - I recommend always choosing custom weather because you can always easily turn live weather on or off during the flight.
Same issue here!