Live Weather Reports and Discussion

My own experience with the development process is that they ran roughshod through the feature list with a minimal implementation in order to make August 18. They are intimately familiar with what features are missing, and what needs additional work, whereas we are looking at a proprietary mystery box and noticing things appear to be broken without a real way to track how or why. The game stays in that kind of broken, half baked state until enough users make enough racket that the developers prioritize that issue. This isn’t a matter of them being clueless to some quirk that is hard to reproduce, and all they need is better documentation of it. It’s a matter of clamoring for attention until they finish the feature set. It’s why the moderators on here tell everyone to report their problems to Zendesk, even though the same issue has already been reported 1000 times, and why the post above this one had broken weather on the last ten flights. They know it’s broken. But hopefully if these discussion are ongoing and the pressure is maintained, attention will be directed where it’s needed, or else they’re going to call this incomplete or minimally complete implementation “good enough”.

The trope on here is “I wouldn’t expect study level out of the box”, and that goes for weather too I guess. I also wouldn’t expect highly dynamic convective systems to be picked up before or as they’re forming like that August 10 derecho. The global ensemble 12-hour forecast should probably work well enough for 95% of the users and cases on here I’d imagine. Even with the 6 hour lag getting the 12z Meteoblue run into Flight Simulator, it should have been able to get that derecho as it came into Chicago (while missing its morning track over Iowa). But users’ experiences aren’t anything like this.

The beauty of their approach is that once they’ve implemented this gorgeous volumetric weather engine with layers and tiles that blend, then actually setting it to live data should have been relatively straightforward. They need only query Meteoblue’s output for a variable list at location x,y,z at forecast time f(t) and f(t+1) and then average these variables to get the “current weather”.

The accuracy of the sim weather using this particular model would suffer a bit compared to something like the GFS, which updates twice as often and finishes its runs hours earlier. But I totally get why they did it. The convenience of having Meteoblue produce simulator specific variables for them allows them to focus on other aspects of the game.

It’s anyone’s speculation why the live weather appears a day old or completely mismatched. But my own guess is that it’s that the implementation of live weather and the weather engine itself are only half done, works in progress like much of the rest of the game.

I’d hope Asobo spends its time working on that core weather engine so the sim can actually draw the different weather types users expect, and process generic weather data as it comes in. I wouldn’t expect them to start blending in a complicated mix of METARs, higher resolution regional or convection allowing models, or radar data, unless Meteoblue is also in this for the long haul and is actively developing for the game still.

So my other hope is that once they finish implementing the weather engine, they expose it to the third party developers with a user configurable source. The sim shouldn’t care where the data is actually coming from when it grabs variables at a lat, lon, and time, whether it’s the GFS when you’re over the ocean, or the HRRR when you’re over the continental US or METAR when you’re at an airport. Perhaps this will never happen, however, due to some agreement with Meteoblue, just like we won’t see Google Maps imagery in the scenery.

But my worry is that the foundation on which the weather is built is shaky. We don’t have cirrus, real haze or fog, or thermals, ceilings and tops that are accurate or controllable last I checked. Even if the sim is exposed to third party injection, there might be nothing to plug those variables into. It’s the same worry I have for the aircraft. Everyone is saying, “Just wait for the third party developers to come along and you’ll get planes that fly properly.” But there appears to be fundamental issues with the aerodynamics engine itself. You don’t need much of any rudder correction in flight, and you can’t use the rudder to effectively side slip. Third party add-ons aren’t going to fix that if the simulator isn’t even modeling some of these aerodynamics. It might be the same way with the weather, and if these issues don’t start getting prioritized on these forums and development snapshots, this going to be know as the simulator with half baked weather for a long time.

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That’s what live means as far as I am concerned, if it is happening now its live, if it happened hours ago it isnt.

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So, this is pretty much confirmed and replicated by me. If you select live weather AFTER airports, it’s always bogus (usually 270/4 at both - I am currently traveling in Africa and the Middle East)
 If you select Live Weather as the first thing, it’s always variable and different at each airport. If you make a mistake of selecting airports BEFORE live weather, you can’t just go to main menu - you have to hit RESET in flight planning screen. Then select weather before any specific airport.

The in-sim live weather closely matches Meteoblue (the MSFS source data) The Meteoblue service is a global weather data-source, so for general weather like winds aloft and cloud cover, it is very good source. But for METAR, its a little off I find unfortunately. It seems to report winds a kts lower than the METAR for a given airfield. E.g. at YBBN, FR24 reports METAR as 010/16 kts - nice sporty winds! Meteoblue reports ‘N 5-10 kts’ This isn’t METAR format, even though can search YBBN in Meteoblue directly, so I wonder if MB even pulls METAR data in the first place. When landing at YBBN in-sim, the winds were 027/15 kts at 1,000 ft and 032/8 kts at the threshold. This is much better than in the previous version of the sim. It’s improving and it is a complex thing to accomplish > globally < and within certain timeframes, it is evolving in the right direction for sure.

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I’ve seen others saying that restarting the sim before a flight cures the no-live-weather bug, so what you say makes sense. I don’t recall having the problem even once myself since the patch, but that’s probably because I’ve been using nothing but the live weather (so it starts up already selected), and shutting the sim down at the end of each flight. Good to know that a flight-plan reset cures it too.

Still a bug, obviously, but shouldn’t be too difficult to fix.

Interesting
 For me, the weather after each flight (or after starting the sim) is always on Preset. I have to change it to Live every time before the flight. But yes, a restart of the sim is not necessary, just selecting the weather before anything else, or resetting the flight planning module.

Are you changing time? You’ll still have live weather but if its 2 pm in real world but you change the time it will show preset but still provide live weather

Am just flying around Tasmania, with live weather active, am also using Flight Radar 24 to get up to date weather for each of the airports I am doing touch and goes
also so far, the basic functions of the auto pilot appear to be working correctly, including the direct to function. Am using the default C172, set on max realism.
In controlled airspace/airports, regretfully the MFS ATIS is inop, however on contacting the tower, the weather report they give, pretty well matches up to our CASA’s NAIPS report, and Flight Radar 24. I’d suggest that MFS is probably a few hours out of currency
but it has been near enough to at least set up a VFR approach for landing. A bit of positive news at least.
Also the water is showing fantastic wind effect and the colour is very realistic, something I hadn’t seen before
usually it is just a flat blue canvas.

I’m finding that the plane feel too stable at lower levels, e.g when coming into land. Feel like the plane is on rails like FSX. In real life you often get bumpiness as you come into land as you enter pockets of turbulence or wind effect. It’s a shame this doesn’t seem to be simulated at low levels is fs2020. Higher up it seems to work fine

Have you tried adding your own wind layer on low altitude?

Yes i can get decent wind sheer by editing weather but not the turbulence. Live weather is the real issue. Very little wind or turbulence at low level

I just loaded a flight at my home airport in New York State. The depiction of worldwide clouds on the live weather map looked very close to the current satellite - BUT, when I loaded in the sim, the pressure and wind direction were way off. Checking historical weather at aviationweather.gov at my airport shows that the in-game pressure and wind are very close to what they would have been exactly 24 hours ago. At that time, pressure was 30.58 and wind was 330 degrees at 10. Live weather is giving 30.56 and 350 at 6. The actual weather today is 30.27 and 240 at 8.

Yes, the same thing happened to me. In another topic, I posted an image that shows “live weather” within the game, which actually depicted the state 10 hours before. I know exactly, because I flew the day before (mostly cloudy) and in the morning, when there was already clear sunlight all over my country, I faced 10 hours earlier cloudy weather.

I flew into an airport on the Isle of Man. The map view said winds at the airport were 26. ATC said they were 35 on approach and when I landed the Garmin in the plane said they were only 10! Anyone care to explain what’s going on? I noticed the winds were accurately displayed on the Garmin at about 900 feet so are the winds displayed on the map and by ATC winds aloft and not surface winds?

Official airport surface winds are measured at 10 meters (33 feet) above the ground. The wind right at the surface will always less by a certain amount.

You do realize that there’s a plethora of reports on this very forum dealing with a broken “live” weather, don’t you?!

It’s been broken and reported to the devs at least since January, so don’t hold your breath that it’s gonna be fixed anytime soon.

Ok thanks. TBH there isn’t much difference in wind speed between ground and 33 feet so there’s clearly a disconnect between winds given by ATC, live weather on the map screen and winds displayed on the Garmin, all of which show wildly different values. Here’s hoping REX’s weather force can sort this all out!

I’m just discovering for myself thank you. I don’t have time to trawl through the forums, I’m too busy flying

Well, enjoy!! :slight_smile: