Live weather is off only in certain hours of the day?

After some months without using MSFS due to the weather issue, in the last couple of days I tried again to see if something was improved weather-side.

After some tests I’ve found out that if I fly approximately between 13 and 18 GMT/UTC, weather is pretty spot on both on the ground and in the air. This happens both in US and Europe.

However if I fly after 18 GMT/UTC weather is off both on the ground and in the air: sometimes cloud coverage is off, sometimes winds aloft etc…

I was wondering if somebody has noticed this too.

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Yes. I have seen this on several occasions.

As it happens, the time you mention is close to when a new, updated MeteoBlue forecast model shouid be published. MB runs their model twice per day beginning at 0000Z and 1200Z. According to their web site, their NEMS model, which is the one that MSFS uses, takes about 5 hours of processing time before it is ready for end users like Microsoft - so, that would mean that the new model would be available around 0500Z and 1700Z each day.

What I do not know is how the completed model gets from MeteoBlue to Microsoft. Either MB would push the final product to Microsoft (upload), or Microsoft would pull the product from MeteoBlue (download). The latter is probably the most likely.

I also assume that the model data needs to have some post-processing done by Azure to put it into a form to be streamed to MSFS players.

If there is a delay in getting the MB model run from 1700 imported and processed at Microsoft’s end, the result might well be that after 1800, you might get “old” forecast data from 12 or 24 hours previously.