OK, and you do know that this happened around pre SU7 when all of the VATSIM users were unhappy about not having METAR based weather, right? That changed, and then things started moving in a different direction. So if anyone is to be responsible for changing things, it would be VATSIM pilots. Asobo just did what people voted for. 
Either way my man, sometimes you just have to move on. Bug is logged.
Yes, i think we need to accept flight simulators is meant to be fixed as METAR says to be realistic.
But to me it limits flight simulators to feel realistic.
I think thatâs why i defended the old system so much because it were the first time in a flight simulator the weather actually felt real.
4 Likes
It wasnât just VATSIM users, it was any pilot who knows how to use aviation weather tools to make pre-flight and/or in-flight decisions. In the sim, we donât have any preflight tools. We donât have in-flight tools like ATC to tell us âthereâs an area of moderate to heavy precipitation at your 12 oâclock, 10 miles,â we donât have PIREPs, we donât have radar (or itâs had extremely limited functionality, at best). All we had was AWOS/ASOS and ATIS to tell us anything is going on beyond our little bubble. What weather there was was based on hours-old forecasts, animated but on rails, made into unrealistic mosaics, bound within limited geographical areas.
Sure, at times it looked nice, but it was incredibly unrealistic and inaccurate for VFR flying and the Aeronautical Decision Making that goes into that (especially anywhere that was less than clear and a million forecast). Thunderstorms that appeared out of nowhere (with laughably low tops), fog, rain, oh, the icing, etc. When you hit the seams, it was a wild guess as to what you were heading into next.
At least now itâs fairly predictable using those aviation weather tools, though itâs still off occasionally. Itâs a lot closer.
But how is this new system better at showing thunderstorms? Actually i think iâve never seen that since su7 were released. And icing i have not experienced either. I can agree that the effects of the icing on the aircraft were unrealistic. But that is not the weathers fault. Well, hope this change were worth it. For me it were not worth it. But thats my opinion.
3 Likes
Itâs not. I think we agree that thunderstorms still need a lot of work. I was just saying it wasnât a panacea for them in the before-times, either.
I agree it had issues, But it didnât need a complete overhaul that we got with su7. For the fog they could just have added that. No need to change the whole weather system to integrate that. They added winds, pressure and temp from METAR November 2020 without the need to completely change the weather globally. They should have done the same with the visuals of METAR. Not try to blend two completely different weather sources. If they did that they could have made the METAR feature optional. Now both METAR and Meteoblue data is intergrate/blended.
Well, i bet itâs too late to do that now. Better to move on as @anon44786522 says.
At the release of this sim i actually hoped for more things added from Meteoblue data that already fits globally. But instead the community wanted those METAR data that needs endless transition fixes. Thats the future of this weather system since su7. And that is not wrong. Only not what i expected of this sim when i watched the advertisement videos before this sim got released. They mentioned Meteoblue as weather source.
2 Likes
I just want to say that changing the game because of the wish of some people, without knowing the end result is unfair.
Also, for the people who claim to be pilots, how can the weather be more accurate if the only clouds you get are mostly cumulus? The weather itself behaves very differently when flying within different clouds type, or do you just love to see the rain in the game matching your window? Heck we donât even have thunderstorms anymore!! What people should have asked is more real weather like challenges, or two versions of the game and one for people who just want to enjoy a relaxing flight with some realustick looking weather (yes even if sometimes not that accurate) still it eludes me how the current state of things is more precise?! since clouds types are missing along with different layers, thunderstorms ettcâŚ
7 Likes
Theyâre not missing. Presets tells us that. Theyâre just not being used. And that discussion has been around for quite some time. Weather changes are coming down the pipe and in small increments. So just enjoy what we have now and think of all the new changes coming out every few weeks or months as being small little Christmases. IDK what else to tell people, itâs been logged, the complaints have been heard and acknowledged, and thereâs NOTHING else to do but just wait and enjoy the sim until it happens. For those who canât wait, IDK what else to tell you? MSFS isnât the only flight simulator out thereâŚ
I hope to see varied weather again in the future that forms over time that makes the weather feel unique every single flight. Thats what iâm looking forward to and has looked forward to since su7 got released. I were also hoping they would get more data from Meteoblue integrated in live-weather. But as it is now i only hope to see a weather without METAR that disturbs the feeling of weather. If i wanted to use METAR weather i could have used the free 3rd party addon âunreal weatherâ. Now we are all forced to use it because there is no option to turn that off.
We had options before su7 and now we have none. That dissapoints me the most. Those that asked for METAR actually had both systems already but needed both systems together and got that but we other got stolen of the thing that we already enjoyed. That makes me agree is unfair as @SealedVolcano50 said.
3 Likes
âclaimâ
There is definitely a preponderance of cumulus, which I hope is tempered eventually, but the position, coverage, movement, timing is better than it was. Thatâs far more important to me.
Also, Iâm seeing pretty good layers - had some great ones in my last flight - didnât look like puffy clouds of doom, instead was a nice layered mix with gradually lowering visibility and ceilings coming into the back side of a system, just as the forecast was calling for.
I spent a lot of time flying around the world âpre-su7â as is repeated often here, and the weather was always fairly laughable. As in weâd laugh about it on my stream: âwell that wasnât realistic at all,â or my favorite, âwe just got Asoboedâ as the weather shifted regions and bad weather suddenly materialized. It wasnât fluid unless you stayed in one area or went so fast that you couldnât tell. It wasnât any more or less realistic looking than it is now - it was just presented differently in some areas that people notice.
But it would cause anybody with a background in weather to go âwhat the heck was that?â So I take the complaints with a big grain of salt.
1 Like
Yes, i must agree the weather is improving a bit. But circles of weather around airports that marks where the airport is located isnât accurate to me. Why canât they add the METAR weather conditions in the near vicinity of airports and then let that weather move with the wind and behave like weather. Or for example if METAR says fog why not let it build up fog over time. Does it really need to be fixed over airports for 30 minutes? Why canât they make the METAR weather be a trigger for weather to be formed over time instead of be placed/painted. The METAR weather feels more like a POI marker than weather. Like an assistance that shows where airports is located. Same for winds, i think winds should also be dynamic and varied. The wind readings on a METAR should only be a guidance but the actual wind should be dynamic near that value METAR says. The value on a METAR should be the average wind over 10 minutes of time. Not fixed for 30 minutes. When they added the gusts it feels a bit more varied but we can feel when we get close to a METAR airport.
6 Likes
Completely true. The question is who doesnât understand this: the MS developers, or the VATSIM âpilotsâ whom the MS developers wanted to make happy.
2 Likes
The METAR clouds are not âfixedâ and static. They move with the prevailing wind, and change shape and coverage as they move. I spent an hour sitting at Nashville yesterday watching them move. Sometimes it was almost completely overcast, and sometimes broken. There was rain in the METAR, but the rain was not continuous - it would start and stop as thicker clouds moved overhead.
1 Like
But iâve seen many times on radar a circle of rain and looking down at those METAR clouds itâs like a circle with the airport in the center of those. Maybe the clouds move with wind but they are fixed in a circle.
1 Like
Iâve noticed the same on the in-sim radar. However, Iâm not 100% sure what the radar is representing in the visual of the sim. I did some correlation with METAR reports and the little bubbles indicated on radar: -RA, RA, and +RA seem to change the color, as youâd expect, but as @HalberQuacky pointed out, visually, things are moving within and itâs often a fairly seamless integration with the surrounding non-METAR data. Unless, that is, the surrounding area is depicted as majorly different for whatever reason, then we see those âbubblesâ visually in the sim, indicating a discrepancy between MB and the METAR.
Iâd, in general, agree with this. METAR generally does average winds for two minutes and if thereâs a big shift in between, it should issue a SPECI. I donât know if the sim scrubs for those.
I think a lot of this conversation is based on guessing what the real-world equipment does, how the data get to the sim, and how the sim interprets them. As far as the visual of the sim goes, I havenât had a lot of major âhead-shakingâ issues in the last few updates, except for the overly chunky clouds in some instances.
I agree, it means MB is not accurate to METAR at that specific location. But adding the weather from a METAR as a circle just shows how much less data a METAR has. If they used the data from METAR and tried to make the weather reported on a METAR actually feels like weather then it wouldnât have been an issue for me. Because i feel i already had that type of weather with those 3rd party tools before su7. No need to inject that into the MB experience in my opinion. Just to start the addon instead if we needed some more accuracy around airports.
1 Like
Here is another example: KTPA METAR shows Broken 9,000 feetâŚ
Below is what Live weather displays for Broken 9,000 feet. Inside the âMETAR bubbleâ itâs always SCATTERED or BROKEN COTTONBALLS @ 3,000 FEET.
I went into manual weather and created what SHOULD be Broken clouds @ 9,000 feet. This is more in line with what used to be in MSFS live weather before the METARS got added to the system.
17 Likes
It would be a better comparison if you moved outside the METAR bubble and took a screenshot of what live weather was generating there.
In the first screenshot you can see in the distance that the clouds turn from the scattered popcorn over the airport to a more stabilized and realistic looking cloud type, but even those arenât exactly âbroken at 9,000 feetâ either. Somewhere along the line the live weather higher cloud levels and got severely bugged. The clouds inside METAR areas really never were correct, the system seems to just plop in various amounts of âcumulus blobsâ depending on if scattered, broken or overcast - itâs always âcumulus blobsâ.
My hopes are âtheyâre working on itâ and âwill blow us awayâ like said back in June 30th 2021 Dev Q&A - what ever happened to this? My gut feeling is that the x-box could not handle the resolution Jorg speaks of so we ended up all suffering? https://youtu.be/sdhEbrNsBF0?t=2475
4 Likes
KTPA, live weather at ground level.
Now lets see if we can spot the METAR hole/island, depending on what the surrounding non-METAR weather is doing, from 200,000ft:
Honestly not what I was expecting to see. Iâve seen sharply defined METAR holes before, but this doesnât look like one. But it does have that cotton ball cloud weather in that area.
To the North you can see completely different, more uniform cloud coverage.
And at the top of the image you can make out the gridwork clouds, which as you move towards them they get covered over by the other cloud formation.
One second itâs this:
The all of a sudden its this:
1 Like