I could agree that the weather can be repetitive by showing the same basic cloudscapes for only a small handful of situations but it really does seem to be improving. Maybe its just improving for XBox players? Thunder and lightning came back for me a few months ago on a flight near Memphis TN and other things like higher altitude overcasts are slowly getting better. I can’t call it boring though… not any more… at least not boring all the time – just repetitive sometimes…needs more variety. and I don’t think New Zealand has towering cumulus at this time of year…maybe, but I’d expect mostly stratus type.
Put June 7 of 2023 in New York daytime and fly to Manhattan, you will be inpressed with the orange smoke
That tornado in the trailer is not live weather. It’s a custome preset for a particular mission flight.
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While this may be true, Jorg has said that tornadoes will be able to be spawned by MSFS’s weather engine, and won’t be restricted to mission presets.
Also they do things like “loop and go’s”, where one loops over a runway, and the bottom of the loop is a touch-and-go. Hey, who doesn’t need a break from reality?!?
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I have found myself using live weather almost exclusively, mostly because it’s NOT boring in all the right ways: wind direction and speed varies realistically at ground level, and aloft. Conditions depicted in-sim are usually spot-on, I’ll take a peek outside and see the same conditions when I’m flying in my region. When IRL conditions are too much, and I decide to select a weather preset, it’s not as much fun because “check winds aloft, it’s 8 knots at 270, just like it’s been for the ENTIRE FLIGHT”. Now that sucks. I would offer the following suggestions/feature requests for live weather:
- Thunderstorms and clouds do not currently depict the realistic turbulent conditions you’d expect to find.
- Wake turbulence is non-existent. This would be super handy for the study of what happens in these hazardous conditions. I think a neat mission would be “operating in the vicinity of large aircraft”, so AI heavy planes are in the pattern, and you have to deal with it.
- For the WX presets, I think there needs to be a system to still inject realistic change to winds aloft at the very least. Why not make all of the weather change if you start with a preset? I’d love to be able to select borderline VFR conditions, then see if it turns into a no-go.
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Which is scary. There are so many other specific atmospheric things that have to happen before a real-life tornado spawns, very few to none of which have been demonstrated to be emulated in the current version of the sim. If they have nailed all the other stuff down and are also able to spawn a tornado in 2024, fantastic, but I’m not going to hold my breath on that one being both intrinsic to live weather and accurate.
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In the distant past, I advocated for a system that would separate wind/temp/pressure, surface visibility, clouds/precip, turbulence, and snow cover each into a toggle between live injection and preset. That way you can still use flight planning elements and/or focus on the mission without certain things causing a no-go. And removing snow cover for better scenery visibility without ditching the entire live weather experience.
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I don’t think you can expect it to be really accurate. Likely it will be based on real-world supercell activity, which the sim’s weather engine will interpret to randomly spawn a tornado once in X number of conducive situations.
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Correct; but according to Jorg, as I mentioned above, he said live weather will be improved and referenced that tornadoes are in the sim. (via the houston flight sim expo)
Better than what we currently have (don’t have). 
But yea, I don’t expect it to be too realistic.
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Just compare the Feature Discovery video to what we have now.
It will all come down to how good the implementation is and how the “community” will react to it.
With MSFS2020 now being in its remaining term, the discussion in this thread is way too late.
As I said earlier, the sad truth is that too few users have cared about the issues discussed in this and other threads.
We will probably start anew once MSFS2024 is released, because the tornado advertisement clearly points in the wrong direction, but that’s just me being pessimistic…
Hey, I’ll be happy if they can resolve down to the supercell level without them just randomly being part of a larger (synoptic or mesoscale) system. With the kind of spatiotemporal resolution necessary for that, a lot of our weather issues could be solved.
I remain skeptical, but hopeful.
[slightly off topic] If you’re looking for challenging weather (and check if it’s actually simulated in FS2020) you might wanna try this site (I’m not affiliated whatsoever )
I stand corrected I to my shock and absolute AWE just spawned into a thunderstorm…
Altho I am in group mode (solo) if that matters. First time I have seen thunder showers and lighting in two years.
Curious to those who are seeing the storms are you in ALL, GROUP, and or Live mode?
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The mode doesn’t matter, it’s just chance.
I’m really looking forward to FS24, and I mean the best of intentions, but the devs shouldn’t even bother with Live Weather tornadoes. They’re too rare, and too fleeting to be of any significance in the sim. But more importantly, and no offense, there is no way they’re going to pull it off with any kind of realism. We’re really struggling to get the very basics of storms working here. The above screenshot two posts up depicts a shallow puff of convection that shouldn’t be producing cloud-to-ground lightning. Imagine when we start seeing random tornadoes coming out of any cloud. It’s going to look like a cartoon and really detract from the sim.
If they can “hard code” a half-way decent, already in progress supercell for their scripted meteorology research missions, I’ll be pretty geeked. If they can make the Live Weather thunderstorms just a little more plausible I’ll be super happy, and we can save the supercells and tornadoes for FS36 maybe.
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Maybe the look of a supecells/tornadoes they may nail but we will never have the danger/chaos/turbulence those type of supercells causes. We should be able to fly and look how it looks like inside with a cessna 152. Thats what causes massive amount of users to use the sim. The danger will only create overdone statements here on the forum. Trubulence can be overdone in reality too, thats why we avoid flying in those type of weatherconditions IRL. In a sim we should not need to avoid it only pretend that we need to avoid it.
C’mon… hands up, who’s tried to land in a 150kt crosswind, just for the fun of it?
Guilty!
I just mean if a tronado causes 150KTS of winds and massive amount of turbulence/chaos IRL it should be simulated to cause that in the sim as well. Thats my view of simulation. Why implement storms and bad weather conditions if it’s not meant to be simulated propperly. Better to have fair weather all the time.
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