Live weather from the future -- possible time zone issue?

[Vibstronium]

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done

Are you using Developer Mode or made changes in it?

no

Brief description of the issue:

Live Weather often seems off, but it may be off by time zone rather than in quality per se. Flying yesterday morning in Florida (between Tampa Bay and the Space Coast following I-4) I found that around 8 am Pacific local time where I was playing – 11 am Eastern time in the simulator, a time that was correctly reported on the avionics display in the aircraft – I encountered heavy clouds that weren’t visible in current satellite imagery as seen in ForeFlight.

However, if I looked at cloud coverage predictions for the coming day, I saw that there were clouds predicted there between 3 and 6 hours in the future. Note that Eastern Daylight Time is UTC minus 4 hours.

Another user recently reported a similar experience flying in Ontario (also Eastern time zone), with an unexpected storm which appeared IRL five hours later:

Questions about VATSIM

It’s just over 5 hours later and the apocalyptic storm I encountered in my flight is now here. So I guess the weather in sim is now ahead of real world weather instead of being behind like it used to be.

I have not yet done a thorough research of this, but I did hear about some past problems on the forum where it seemed to be using past weather. Has something shifted where the time zone offset is being applied incorrectly in the forward direction, and predicted weather from the future is being used?

Has anyone noticed similar problems flying in other time zones, and measured the time offset involved? Does it match the offset of the time zone?

Provide Screenshot(s)/video(s) of the issue encountered:

Unexpected clouds and lightning:

ForeFlight showing the current satellite data around 8am Pacific / 11am Eastern time:

ForeFlight showing predicted clouds for 1500 UTC (same time):

ForeFlight showing predicted clouds for 1800 UTC (3 hours later):

Detail steps to reproduce the issue encountered:

• fly with Live Weather turned on in US/Canada Eastern time zone (eg, Florida or Ontario)
• watch the weather
• compare it to predicted weather from NOAA etc
• or wait a few hours and compare it to reality, if you’re local

PC specs for those who want to assist (if not entered in your profile)

• n/a

Build Version # when you first started experiencing this issue:

• 1.18.15.0

Are you on the Steam or Microsoft Store version?

MS Store

Did you submit this to Zendesk? If so, what is your ticket #?

Done, but it didn’t give me a ticket number; it said only:

[Crunchmeister71]

I’m definitely going to be keeping an eye out for this.

The storm I encountered at CYGK in the sim was the most intense I’ve seen so far. The volume of rain and intensity of the lightning seemed like something out of a Roland Emmerich disaster movie more than reality. Oddly, there was no wind associated with this internet storm, with my instruments showing 5 kts. It was so odd.

Yet outside my window, the sky was mostly clear and the weather was lovely.

Then exactly 5 hours later, all hell broke lose outside. Intense rain that flooded the street. I couldn’t even see the house across the street it was coming down so hard. And the thunder and lightning were ridiculous. And oddly, just like in the sim 5 hours earlier, no wind to speak of associated with this intense storm. I’d say the weather conditions were as close IRL to the earlier storm in the sim as you could possibly get.

The same very unusual weather system in sim as IRL, offset by exactly the time difference between local time and UTC. That can’t be a coincidence.

[Vibstronium]

Looking at weather in the gulf coast now:

Circa UTC 12:50 at Houston, Texas.

METAR for KIAH shows clouds “few 2000’” and “broken 19,000’, broken 22,000’”; enhanced satellite imagery as shown in ForeFlight shows no major cloud cover at Houston:

Cloud predictions for 12:00 UTC (~1 hour in past) match; bits of clouds but not a lot:

Cloud predictions for 18:00 UTC (~5 hours in future) show heavy cloud cover having rolled in:

MSFS world map matches the future prediction:

MSFS live weather in sim matches the future prediction:

Current time zone settings on my computer, showing correct Pacific time:

[Boscoh1]

I noticed the same for Houston area today. Live weather matches the future forecast and not current conditions. Some good analysis going on in this thread.

[Vibstronium]

Had some mismatched weather in the Los Angeles area this morning, more aggressive clouds than I could see in recent METAR data or forecasts via ForeFlight.

Landing at Burbank (KBUR), the METAR data less than an hour old said sky clear:

But there’s low clouds blocking the valley, and I had to dive under the clouds to make a roundabout approach:

Clouds forecast from NOAA shows either clear or scattered clouds:

Clouds don’t show up on forecasts until late at night / early morning, much earlier than I was flying (almost 7am local time). From the previous forecast for last night / this morning:

BKN007 looks like the clouds I saw over the airport (broken at 700’) but that’s listed as between 24:00Z and 11:00Z, and I was flying around 14:45Z.

So either it’s pulling data from several hours in the past, or many hours in the future here.

This is Pacific Daylight Time (UTC-7).

It may also just be a sufficiently broken weather model that it can’t distinguish between the coast and the valleys?

[autey111]

It has always done this. It is not live weather. It is future predicted weather.

[Vibstronium]

Be nice if they fix that some day. But even so, which future? When? It seems terribly inconsistent.

[Aleemosi1974]

Is always thundering in miami area on live weather even when is not. How to fix this?

[utd4life12]

This was an issue before that I looked into quite extensively for a long time and eventually Asobo did identify a bug where live weather would be loaded 12 hours in advance at a certain time. It took a lot of back and forward with them to get to a point where eventually it seemed to be fixed.

Sounds like it’s been reintroduced.

[sydicek]

Oh no, not this again…