My main issue with the weather system at the moment is the innability for it to depict low visibility outside of just rain, and low cloud.
For me, the QNH, wind, cloud layers etc always appear accurate, however a low vis fog/mist situation will be depicted with clear skies in most cases. For example, This metar SLSI 121100Z 00000KT 0100 FG VV/// 21/21 Q1011
which is clearly incorrect. The rest of the values from the metar (wind, QNH) are correct, however the visibility, Fog are completely absent. This consistently happens everywhere. To get this example all I did was find a terrible visibility metar and load up in the sim
Exactly this! I work at an airport as a meteorologist and it really irks me. When there is a full blown fog with very low RVRs and vertical visibility at 100 ft, it’s clear skies in the sim.
It would be REALLY cool to properly simulate fog. You know… so you could use an autoland feature when it eventually comes. Right now the lowest ceilings I’ve encountered were around 300 feet, which is around CAT II… that’s just not enough.
EDIT: Also, not only to use the autoland feature, but to make it more realistic in terms of go arounds when descending to the minima etc.
Winds are a complete mismatch. The Caribbean has winds from the east 99% of the time. I have yet to have ATIS at any airport call winds from that direction (almost always westerly). It’s just ridiculous. Even if it doesn’t match METAR, at least you would think they would match prevailing trends.
So basically, we are 7 months after the release and the more we receive updates, the less this sim is working. Now, in live weather, as soon as storm is reported, there is a perfect blue sky in the sim.
Fed up with all this!
So much for live weather. And no, it’s not because it’s a little behind, I get that, it can’t be really really live. But I was at a night shift and it was overcast with ceiling around 4000 ft throughout the second half of the night and in the morning.
To be fair to Asobo, I re-tested a few hours later and the weather was spot on! Multiple snow showers at the airport and in the vicinity, wind was also from the right direction.
Maybe the weather really is just 2 to 3 hours late?
The worst thing for me about live weather, is that along the US coast of Lake Eire, there appears to be 4 different weather ‘boxes’ between Cleveland Ohio and Erie Pa., and everytime you hit the edge of the weather box you get a spurt of ‘turbulance’ the lake will change (waves disappear, pressure change) and all we be smooth sailing again until you hit the next weather box and then again spurt of turbulence, waves will come back etc. this will happen 4 time in the course of a 20-40 min flight depending on whether Im flying an airliner or GA.
I wish they would of set up weather, so that it takes your starting location, and then you finishing position, and set the weather between the here and there points, so that you would get a nice smooth transition. The way it is now suxors, because the turbulence during the switch if your @ a couple of thousand feets isnt terrible, but if your skimming the surface of the lake the turblence and loss of B. Pressure can, (and have) send you crashing into the lake.
I still have hopes that they will eventually adress all these problems and make it better.
They did acknowledge that there are problems
It just takes so damned long and it seems to have not the high priority it needs.
There is tons of good stuff about the new approach to depict weather.
I witnessed this today as I was switching between platforms.
I started with a 737-800 flight from Stavanger to Oslo in P3Dv4 with Active Sky.
That was as good as this approach to weather gets. Upon arriving at Oslo the skies were clear because the METAR reports CAVOK, and that means there are no clouds or other significant weather phenomena below MSA.
But was clear skies the correct depiction? Meteoblue and MSFS showed that it wasn’t when I started my second leg from Oslo within MSFS.
There WAS a ceiling of clouds, but it was at 16.000 feet and as such it did not show up in the METAR and was not drawn as a cloud layer by Active Sky.
And in these situations the new approach is superiour to the weather stations through METAR approach of earlier sims.
Notwithstanding all the consistant bugs and the incapability of the engine to draw haze and fog correctly at this point.
That is strange. Ive done a quick test with this theory.
I did a flight into LFLB, at the time the metar was reporting CAVOK. In sim i had overcast clouds at 6500ft,
at 1200z, Going back i checked the metars for 0530z, which showed few 3600ft. And then 10z which showed CAVOK. I suspect Its probably not delayed by a few hours, rather that its very hit and miss. aka sometimes itll be right, sometimes it wont. Either way they really do need to fix these problems.
Quick update - after the last several flights, I have to report my weather is working much better. And thinking about the timing when I noticed the change (not scientific) I have to say it may not be Sim Update III but maybe the Windows CU that I did a couple weeks ago. I noticed for the last few months Edge has been incorrectly thinking I was in another state, and that happened to be the same (not large) state my ISP was HQ in (Cox). Now suddenly Edge knows I’m in Ohio, and the World Map shows proper clouds/precip. It could be coincidence but there seems a strong correlation potential. I’m wondering if location data in Windows was not working, and when the sim loaded, it couldn’t figure out what time zone I was in. Something that couldn’t match, so it didn’t know what to show. Will report if my weather suddenly breaks again.
Agreed. There is so much benefit from this approach, as METARs are incredibly limited, aka only showing relevant information in the viscinity of the aerodrome. Your example with CAVOK is a perfect example of why METARs are limited. Some sort of blended approach woud probably be best, as even though METARs do have limitations, they are very accurate for close weather to the airfield, so pairing this information with accurate meteoblue data could give a very accurate depiction of the weather. However whatever asobo decides to do they need to increase the accuracy of this meteoblue data, its too far off currently
Yes and clearly clarify the source and forecasts they are using so we can use the meteoblue maps to see what weather will be in the sim at a specific time.
It was not theory. I checked Meteoblue’s live weather maps and satelite data at the time of flight.
It was exactly as it was supposed to be in those condition. A high overcast well above the METAR observation limit.
But just that, not the altitude or anything else.