Wow - I REALLY miss clouds like that. Why oh why indeed did they have to ruin this?
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Here is a video of the beautiful weather/clouds we USED to have before METAR itâs from January 2021. Check out the nice overcast and the lighting is SO MUCH better! Now we just get the one type of cumulus fog puffs that are not opaque at all and give us no sense of motion whatsoever.
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Your post hits the nail on the head directly- and I think a very large growing number of folks are feeling the same. Many people are finally starting to realize that the clouds were totally ruined and reworked and are just âsmoke in mirrorâ effects of some kind of fog effect. I donât even think clouds are volumetric anymore - maybe to get better performance but maybe linked to METAR too? I donât know and I am afraid to say I agree in that Asobo will likely never fix this and that is a SHAME.
I thought they would truly listen to the community but seems to just be enhancements that suit their taste to better performance and please the VATSIM crowd without giving others the option that do not care about METAR.
Why oh why canât they just give the PC users the option to use the weather/effects and NO METAR like before? Probably because that code is long gone?
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I have seen this too - however here is the issue I can explain (or perhaps you already experienced this if you used MSFS since the start?) - when you take off and climb up to the bottom of that âwonderful lookingâ layer of clouds, take note - there is no sudden âbreakâ into the clouds where you lose visibility as in real life. Instead, itâs some kind of slow âtransitionâ where a fog like scene starts to surround you. You can still see the ground, climbing up and up and up, but the fog seems to get âthickerâ around you when finally as you keep climbing âthroughâ the layer, the ground becomes invisible BUT then the blue sky above then appears.
This is not how clouds are. We are supposed to get a sense of motion and more importantly the loss of visibility in an OPAQUE cloud. The clouds are now just fog-like puffs.
In the real world entering and exiting clouds can be disorientating and adds to the complexity of flying IFR. But not so in MSFS since the big cloud change SU5âish? And METAR made it even worse.
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In my dreams I would see a menu option called âWeather sourceâ with 2 options.
- Metar data
- Meteoblue
By doing this, users could decide for themselves where they want their weather to come from rather than have these awful puffy cumulus metar bubble clouds forced upon them.
I would not hesitate to switch back to meteoblue only data to get the wonderful overcast back that we used to have.
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I re opened the topic about a weather update only in the wishlist if anyone is interested
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In my simple mind 
âŠ
Why not model the whole weather on MeteoBlue data and then extract the METAR data from the already modelled weather???
Seems that trying to model/match the weather to MeteoBlue and the METAR data is the root cause of bad clouds.
So just get the weather as close as possible to reality and feed the user/pilot a METAR report based on the sim modelled weather, plus TAF if wanted.
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Granada right now in real life
According to Msfs, looking in the same heading:
LOL
Meteoblue (note âovercastâ, which is true):
Wth is this? 
the sim is capable of depicting the weather so much closely to reality but live weather seems unable. this is a quick manual preset I made:
So much closer!, yet done within the sim.
Previous live weather would have done a muuuuch better work, Iâm sure!. So sad.
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I have tried âFloyds Epic Cloudsâ available as a freeware on Flightsim.to, it has 6 preset set of clouds and it is really good, below an example of preset 01, 3 layers and some fog. Really, weather is so much important for the flight immersion, try it and post your feedback if you wish. After that, it will be difficult to go back to the actual live weather until they fix it. I have my clouds set on Ultra.
That is really good 
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Thanks for the tip, however, the problem is, thatâs not a changing weather and I donât like that as you get the same weather around the world.
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Agree, it can be an alternative solution meanwhile they are fixing the Liveweather (hopefully) and it allows to demonstrate what FS2020 is capable of. Also for people that are saying actual clouds are great in Live weather, maybe trying that addon theyâll change their mind.
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I wish the devs could just tell us the METAR system didnât turned out as we expected and will revert it back in su10.
Or
Not all of the users wanted the new system and we will implement the old weather system as an option in su10.
But that will never happen because i think the old code is gone.
Why didnât they release a preview first with the new weather system? And then they could have got feedback from that. I feel itâs strange they completely changed a really important aspect of the sim without adding an option for it. I want pure Meteoblue data even if itâs 12 hours old. It has so much more detailed data. A METAR has no visual data in it at all. Only how the observer see the weather from ground and then described as broken for example. How does those broken clouds look like in that description? Now the clouds looks as generic as a METAR statement is. Or the visibility? How does that statement look from above? Not like a circle and the airport in the center of it iâm completely sure of.
Maybe Meteoblue data costs too much?
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Thanks for sharing the potential add on! But to me, no matter what the weather is in MSFS anymore, the clouds look terrible, itâs not the accuracy I think most of us are complaining about, it is how convincing the clouds look, how they blend with the atmosphere, and how the light and visibility blend. As it stands now the clouds (no matter what add on or if using live weather) look like âspritesâ from a 1990âs flight simulator or at best FSX.
There is just something very annoying about the clouds now - they all look the same and they are like fragmented and out of place. BOO
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METAR reports is static for 30mins right? The airport is always static and we know for sure where that is located and can plan where to land. If the weather were static over airports for 30 mins why the need of METAR IRL? We have METAR because the weather changes all the time but a weather station canât report every single change in weather. The weather over airports can only be predicted IRL and we know for sure what weather it is when we arrive. We never know for sure what weather we will have there even if we reading a METAR and TAF. That feeling i want in the sim as well. That is achieved with predicted weather. To me using prediction is the perfect way of creating plausible weather in a flightsimulator. Thats why i only want Meteoblue weather.
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has something been changed on the servers again ? after the positive experiences in between the SU9 release - improved appearance, consistency (mostly) with the Meteoblue weather maps - lately I only see these âcloud fragmentsâ everywhere again.
Neither METAR nor METEOBLUE data is consistent - but the performance is somewhat improved!
I made a couple of test flights with the FENIX A320 and although according to METAR and METEOBLUE there should be some cloud cover - I only see sporadic wispy clouds!
or did I just have 1 or 2 bad days ? 
pressure and wind are correct - but the clouds have absolutely no density any more - are almost constantly transparent, especially at night - hope this is not the promised " wow effect" planned in SU10.
Could it be that due to the âcomplaintsâ about the poorer performance in the SU9, everything has been slightly reversed (quality of the clouds and weather) according to the motto âmost people donât notice the difference anyway, and those who do notice it are simply not " listened toâ! without offending anyone, of course!
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For your first issue, maybe you are getting the Live weather from the past days, check this post:
Live weather data issue - weather is 48+ hours old
For the 2nd issue with clouds transparent at night, this is a known issue. It is not only at night, but during day time too with the sun visible through the clouds. I have opened a Zendesk ticket maybe 3 weeks ago, no reply yet. You can check thoses posts:
Post SU7 - Can see ground through overcast at night and sometimes during day
Bright sunlight when inside clouds
Sun visible through heavy cloud
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Thanks for the tips @DementedCorn327 - but know almost every weather topic here in the forum. What I mean is that it has become a little worse in the direction of transparency in the last few days - but can also be an imagination. As I understood it in Q&A (Seb) - it is the âonlyâ way to make pixelated clouds less visible without burdening the performance.
The positive effect is that there are less of the cauliflower clouds. the bug with the âoutdatedâ weather was already known to me (especially on the weather map) but after the release of SU9 I had at least the âcorrectâ weather when loading in the game, now that is also gone, at least the last 2 days - I compare the weather with the current map from Meteoblue (not Worldmap). However FS âLive Weatherâ, at least for me and despite pixelated clouds was still âlive weatherâ until SU5 regardless of known errors and inconsistencies, but that we have explained often enough - letâs see what comes. What annoys me a bit is the lack of âoptionsâ no matter if itâs about turbulences, variable winds, weather quality etc. - things are changed without offering an option to the remaining 100,000 users (who donât mind certain things) just because 1000 complain.
Anyway, in the meantime, enjoy Fenixâs A320 and letâs wait for SU10.
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But i donât think those 1000 expected it to be like it is now. They expected the weather to be exactly the same with better accuracy. I bet they didnât ask for METAR bubbles, Metar transitions, METAR-fog circles around airports, Volcanic ash clouds everywhere, less density in clouds, generic looking clouds etc. Did they mentioned anything about those things before release of su7? No they didnât. Actually they said that METAR bubbles would not be a thing in the su7 update that should create smooth made with Meteoblue and then transfered to the sim. But maybe it was needed to implement METAR and those complained back then have changed their mind about METAR integration and also want an option to turn it back to how it was with a fluid weather system. If they said it would have included all of those things pre su7 everybody would have told them to not release the weather update.
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And to back up what others have said and speaking as a weather geek, the clouds are worse now than when I started playing in October 2020, thunderstorms are non-existent, Iâve not seen a single live thunderstorm since the Weather system was âoverhauledâ last year.
Worse, the thread complaining about the lack of lightning was closed as âResolvedâ. Oh no it isnât.
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