Meteoblue weather data accuracy & reliability

[utd4life12]

As we know live weather has been a hot topic lately. I’ve had experiences of loading in to an airport that has a METAR overcast to be met with only a few clouds or no cloud at all. So I decided to take a closer look at Meteoblue’s data it provides on its website and I noticed that a lot of the time, it seems to be quite innacurate.

Let’s take EGCC as an example now. It has been overcast here for around the past two days, and all day today and is currently still reporting that.

For reference here is the METAR: EGCC 211850Z AUTO VRB03KT 9999 OVC020 03/M00 Q1023 NOSIG

Now let’s take a look at Meteoblue.

Firstly, in the top right, as you can see it reports current conditions as clear with cirrus, this is not correct.
Secondly it has the forecast of 20:00-00:00 as clear, again, not correct.
Despite this it has the METAR info stating overcast, yet it still is telling us it’s clear sky.

In addition to this under the aviation section, it has cloud cover as high clouds 20-40% and medium clouds less than 20%. Again this is not accurate.

Let’s take a look at another example of Dublin EIDW.

Current METAR: EIDW 211830Z 15012KT 9999 FEW013 BKN017 06/03 Q1020 NOSIG

I’ll also include the satellite here as it shows the cloud cover well:

However once again it has the current conditions as clear with cirrus, again this is wrong. Despite this it has the 1900-00:00 forecast as more accurately describing overcast like the satellite suggests a closed cloud layer.

Despite this in-sim we get this:

Totally wrong.

Looking at the Meteograms for Manchester, it looks like it just got the forecast completely wrong, therefore despite an OVC report in METAR, we see clear skies now in-sim.

The point I am trying to make in this post, is that although we load in and sometimes we see weird weather, or innacurate weather and think it’s a bug, it seems that in some cases like this Meteoblue may be largely to blame. Whether it be for providing conflicting information or just getting its forecasting wrong.

I hope anyway, we see weather depiction and accuracy continue to improve in the future

[Stearmandriver2]

Excellent post. This is the whole point right here.

Using model data as sole-source can produce highly inaccurate weather. Meteorologists don’t write forecasts that way for exactly this reason.

[utd4life12]

Yes exactly

I just find Meteoblue’s website in particular though quite conflicting. In the example with Dublin where it shows multiple points of weather information:

1. It’s forecast which it has as overcast
2. The Metar which states broken
3. the Satellite which shows an overcast/closed cloud cover
4. The little widget in the top right which states Clear

I find it rather baffling how it can have those 3 sources of cloud cover, then report clear skies as the current weather in that widget at the top right.

I’m not sure exactly what data Asobo take from Meteoblue, but I sure hope it’s not as conflicting as the data publicly available to us.

[utd4life12]

Just as a sidenote, these two pictures are around 5 minutes apart at EGCC. Not sure if work is being done server side.

[HalberQuacky]

Weather models in general can have a difficult time accurately predicting a shallow low stratus layer. The US GFS model (which is higher resolution than MeteoBlue’s NEMS30 model) can have the same problem.

[utd4life12]

I landed earlier this evening to clear skies, however some cloud present so not the clear sky bug and now I see this:

Maybe server work being done, I’m not really sure.

[RayK1t]

I fly airlines in the sim but I completely skip the weather part because unless you have atc either it doesn’t make a blind bit of difference. They need to fix this for vfr and ifr flight stat!