Live Weather - is it static or dynamic?

I’m finding that when I’ve Live Weather enabled but try to change the time of day or even the date, the actual weather does not change. The weather just stays to what it is at this current minute.
I noticed:

  1. When I’m currently in an active flight, the weather stays exactly the same, regardless of the time of day or changing the date. For example the clouds stay in their current position, they clouds are exactly the same at sunrise, midday and sunset. And then say I change the date to yesterday, again the clouds stay in the exact same position.
  2. When I’m on the World Map screen, I change to the different times and dates but the Flight Conditions remain the same for that airport. As a test I change to another airport in different part of the world, I see the Flight Conditions change but still changing time/date does nothing for the Live Weather.

I’m running a few add-ons, just a couple of aircraft and some scenery, plus one of those Live Traffic. If I turn off the add-ons, I still get the same occurring with Live Weather being static.

PS: I tried taking off from Florida during the current hurricane as of 28th September 2022 but it is still way down in Cuba on my World Map screen. I eventually found this hurricane in the sim over Orlando to Palm Bay area, which is it’s current live position as I’m testing this.
I saw a Youtuber had his hurricane right over Florida both on the World Map and exactly the same in-flight and he recorded that 12 hours ago.

Question:
Does the Live Weather only represent what it is at this present minute, regardless of what time/date is set? Or should the Live Weather actually change to what it was say 1-hour ago, 24-hours ago, last year, etc. as I move the time/date sliders?

My expectation would that the Live Weather would update itself to be a representation of that time and date you choose.

I assumed the weather is live for now regardless of what time you have set. That’s what it seems like anyway.

Hope I good understand,

what ‘LIVE’ word means, I can’t imagine LIVE now with yesterday…
What you mention is some kind of History weather option what isn’t implemented and I think is no reason for that.

Just think. How should the weather system be able to predict the weather, if you set the date for tomorrow?

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From the forecast, obviously with less accuracy the further out you go. My understanding is that the “live weather” already comes from an earlier forecast rather than real live weather information. It would be pretty cool if there was an “Historical” option for the weather.

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That’s right. It should actually be fairly easy for the sim’s weather to change depending on what time and date you have set (plus or minus a few days). All of this data should already be sitting on the servers. It’s just a matter of the devs flipping a switch to use it. Probably one of thousands of features they just haven’t gotten to yet.

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What forecast are you talking about? There is no forecast in MSFS. And will never be. MeteoBlue won’t take themself out of business.

Great thanks for the clarification!

How would providing MSFS with forecast weather take Meteoblue out of business?

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I think you have your answer that Live weather is indeed live.

I would think the question is, where does MSFS get its meteorological data from? And when?

I know the company’s name, but I doubt that Meteoblue is actually hanging a thermometer outside of a shack in Adak. They are clearly pulling the data from a reporting source(s), national or otherwise.

And are they pulling METARs for every station, every hour? Or are they pulling it on demand depending on where users fly?

Considering it’s all text data, you probably COULD keep past metro data. I guess it’s just a matter of if Meteoblue thought it was worth the effort.

Because modelling/forecasting is their main business. And if everybody can get forecast for free worldwide through MSFS, who would be paying them anymore?

Well, it’s not actually free. Microsoft is paying Meteoblue for their services, making us indirect customers of Meteoblue too.

Besides, Meteoblue already provides much of their forecast data online for free:

Their paying clients are unlikely to try to use Flight Simulator to pilfer data. The data they pay for is likely not injected into Flight Simulator, it’s waaaaay too impractical to extract from Flight Simulator, and you have no idea if that’s even the data you’re looking for since there’s no actual timestamp or source affixed to it. You might be stealing rubbish.

Most of the weather data in Flight Simulator comes from a Meteoblue numerical forecast model. The model is run twice a day by computers that crunch weather observations as inputs, and each run of the model outputs a forecast for each hour for the next week or so at gridded points for the entire world. Flight Simulator uses the forecast for the time and location that is most current to where you’re flying, and augments this with other data sources like METARs.

Most weather providers keep several days worth of the previous model runs on their servers so that users can compare them to see how the forecast is changing, or archive them if there is something significant they need to save.

So all the weather data Flight Simulator needs for the previous week and for the next week is probably already sitting on the Meteorblue servers (unless Meteoblue immediately deletes it). The Flight Sim devs probably just need to call a function like GetWeatherData(ModelRun, ForecastHour, LatLon) and now the weather changes when you change the date and time in the UI (out to a certain point).

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Fascinating, I always thought that MSFS would take actual METARs and stitch them into a model.

Is it me or does this method sound less likely to match the weather outside your window? :thinking:

There are some exhaustive debates about this that you can dig up from when SU7 was released and they started blending in more of the METAR observations with the numerical forecast model data.

Both model data and METAR observations have substantial limitations with inherent incompatibilities when used in this context, and we’re still dealing with the issues this creates.

The forecast model data is of course subject to accuracy error. But it’s also dynamic, potentially current to the minute and contains vastly more information than a METAR observation, holding dozens of variables for the entire seamless volume of the atmosphere.

The METAR observations, while usually accurate, are tiny fragments of limited information at point locations and up to an hour old. There is not enough information there to create a believable depiction of the weather that isn’t cartoonishly simple.

So they instead try to augment the forecast data with the METAR observation to try to make conditions at airports more accurate. Since they’re jamming a round peg into a square hole (literally a point radius observation into a square gridded model output) there are problems with blending the two sources, creating seams, nasty transitions, and watering down the depth of the forecast model with simplified METAR information. The weather might instantly change, there could be unnatural bubbles of weather around airports, and multiple layers of varying clouds types could get turned into the same repeating patterns of x/8 coverage cumulus puffs.

Because I’m a GA VFR pilot, I’m in the camp where they should augment the model data with METARs only if they can do so without disrupting the dynamic way the weather changes and flows. I’ll trade absolute accuracy for a plausible depiction of real life, live weather that’s rich and dynamic. Others want the most accurate conditions injected into the sim because they use multiplayer networks that need consistent weather at Airport A and Airport B, and don’t care as much what’s in between or even necessarily how it looks since they’re IFR and ATC is the most important thing.

Ideally, Meteoblue would create a custom weather model just for Flight Simulator that is designed to create realistic depictions of aviation centric weather. It would run every hour and use METAR observations as inputs, forcing the output to conform to those observations. That would make both camps happy and solve many of these issues. That’s likely waaay outside the scope of this $60 video game though.

You can type 1000 words or 10’000 or as many as you want, but it is not going to happen. If you don’t like the weather as is, you always have have the opportunity to create your own presets or import a plentitude of presets created by some bright minds on flightsim.to.

Sure except half the variables aren’t available in the presets, and the weather is no longer dynamic.

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So you think Meteoblue are worried that some person, wanting to know what the weather will be like next week, is going to fire up the flight sim, fly around the place to get their information?

You do realise that weather forecasts are freely available from a bunch of other sources right?

I can get synoptic charts all over the world free of charge and make some educated guesses about what the weather will be like in the next few days.

Hey, thanks for the detailed answer!

It does sound like a conundrum.

Oddly, in my case it’s a wash…my Live Weather rarely seems to work as advertised.

It’s strange however. Generally I am flying in the South Pacific now and I have had several flights that seem to draw in no clouds at all, despite the METAR showing low ceilings.

Yesterday I took off though, and around one of the larger cities of NZ there was a rough ring of low overcast, like a gauze tablecloth thrown over the mountains.

From what you’ve just said it makes me wonder if there isn’t more afoot than just a failure to display any weather.

Hmmmm…

The answer to your question is yes. Live Weather only represent what it is at this present minute, regardless of what time/date is set. There is a thread in the wishlist forum for the functionality you are requesting: Historic Weather (as second timeline)

“Most” of the sim’s Real weather is dynamic, LIVE weather.

The TIME is user changeable, and in effect, changes the position of the SUN in the sim, without changing the injected Real Weather.

Then, on top of that, the Turbulence is “calculated” by Asobo, with a complex algorithm, that take into account, and number of factors, INCLUDING the position that you have forced the sun to, and how much the injected weather allows that sun to interact with the atmosphere & ground.

So the most “realistic” Real Weather is only obtained when the TIME is set to “Real Time” – to match the live MetroBlue weather time.

Ironically, this in a way that introduces the Turbulence Slider that so many want … at the expense of having to alter the “Time of day” slider to change the turbulence.