I believe they said once the combined flight experience of the Asobo team is 6000 hrs, which is not an awful lot considering an experienced commercial pilot might have that amount of hours by him/herself.
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I don’t think it’s simply divided in half everywhere.
I did some pretty dodgy crosswind landings on coastal strips without any trees around, and the crosswinds were nuts on the runway.
When I land with strong crosswinds in urban areas, or areas with lots of trees I get a dropoff in crosswinds. So I’m pretty sure the sim takes surrounding terrain type in account here. Might be fun to test for yourself.
Well it does seem to be halved, it might still be gusty and challenging still. I did some testing with steady wind, placing the aircraft nose into the wind on the ground and check the indicated airspeed, which was even less than half. Also did some landings with the C172 G1000, 40 kts wind on approach became 20 kts during flare.
I think @hobanagerik did some testing as well using SDK / simconnect or something?
Most bizarre thread? I’ve got it in there as ‘witness to a once in a lifetime event’ 
There’s some really good info and knowledge being shared in here though
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Well I haven’t heard that one before Nijn. But I don’t have an enormous problem with the sim but I’ve only got IRL <> 200 hours on Pa 28/C172s. I enjoy the sim a lot and can’t get all this pointless criticism especially from peps that obviously haven’t got a clue. Mind you its the same with the race sim I play all experts on car physics… I’ sure all of us amateurs are happy to hear your pro take on things. Many thanks but don’t forget a lot of the posts come from kids! Cheers Si
Yes, I was using SPAD as a way of viewing the SimConnect data, and watching wind values. Parked up, the wind indicated on the weather panel was almost exactly half in the data I was seeing at ground level. I didn’t play around with slew mode to try and gain a little altitude to see if the wind changed accordingly, but I’m willing to bet it does.
I’ll grab a drink, and have a play. 
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I’m on my way home now, I will also try some scenarios and try to figure out some propeller drag stuff via developer mode or maybe just try and see if there is any difference in glide ratio between flight idle, feather or reverse on the TBM or so.
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Excellent thread filled with some equally excellent real world experience.
I also wonder whether the developers fully grasp the concept and profound effect of aerodynamic propeller drag. Engine drag (although I’d be more inclined to consider this ‘internal friction’) does play a part, however has much less effect on the operation of an aircraft from a pilots’ perspective.
That said, I sympathise with any developer who does not fully comprehend aerodynamic propeller drag as most pilots will also generally avoid being tested on this subject!
Does the propeller emit vector lines in the developer-mode visualisation?
I often wondered why they chose a non-descript, subtle little blue line for one of a twin pilot’s most important references.
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Redline is Vmca isn’t it? Blue line is Vyse? If I remember correctly. We used to do Vmca demonstrations in flight school, not with the engine actually turned off though, engine at slightly above idle to simulate feathered prop.
Correct 
Someone is doing a good job there.
Still 6,000 hrs more than me 
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Okay, just found a bug I think. If I set the wind by typing a number, and I either click away from the box or hit tab, it automatically sets the gusting wind to 150kts! 
That’s by the by…
10kts of wind, 0 gusts, and just to be sure I also monitored the ambient wind direction to double check I am looking at the right variable, and I am:
Now I up the wind to 20kts:
Sure enough, I get half that at ground level:
I then added the variable to get my altitude AGL:
It seems slew mode doesn’t let the figures up date in real time, but I can slew up, and tap y twice to get a snapshot of data:
100ft and its up to 12kts:
500ft and its just under 17kts:
It’s not until we get to around 1000ft AGL do we see 20kts:
Just to see if there was something else funny going on here I took it up to 10,000ft, and I still see the 20kts:
So 20kts on the ground really only applies until you are down to 1000ft AGL, then it tapers off to half of what the weather dialogue shows.
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I had the same 150 kt gust bug yesterday.
I have the feeling that this might have something to do with it:
It is still wrong, I mean ground wind is not the geostrophic wind, but this might be were they got the 50% from. The winds does not back or veer in MSFS though…
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thanks for the test, just did some along a clear coast as well, and it seems to work the same there.
While I’m sure this effect is there in real life, I would say it should scale up to 100% in a couple of feet up from the ground on the coast, and maybe scale up to 100% at around 100-200 feet in more urban or tree filled areas.
edit: @anon50268670 I think they just took the boundary effect, but scaled it up to 1000 feet as standard, instead of varying it between say 5 and 200 feet depending on terrain.
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The wind from TAF, METAR, ATIS and ATC is measured at 10 m above the ground so I would assume, if you place the wind layer on the ground that it represents the windspeed and direction at 10 m, not at 1000 ft. It should then scale this wind at 10 m down to ground level and up until above the friction layer.
I’m pretty sure that is what they did. But it does not make sense if you place the wind layer on the ground, that it assumes the selected wind is the wind above friction layer and the scales it down to ground level. They should take the windspeed you select as ground wind and scale that up to the wind above the friction layer, not vice versa.
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It also does, to my mind at least, some non-sensical things. So If I remove all wind layers, then add a single layer, push it up to 60,000ft and increase it to 150kts, I now see 75kts at ground level. Is that possible?
I then add another layer, and set this to 0, and the wind entirely stops. So you might assume its setting up some gradient between the two wind layers, 150kts above, and 0 below. So I move the 150kt layer down below the 0kt layer, even at ground level, and still no wind!
The instant I delete the 0kt wind layer at 60,000ft, and I see half the 150kt wind layer at ground level.
It looks like some wind layers that get added don’t actually seem to do anything either. You can adjust their wind strength, and they don’t actually appear to do anything.
More work is needed, perhaps. 
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Well its good we cleared that one up, we need to make a bug report for this one.