In the southern US right now there’s a massive storm system from the Gulf up to Ohio with very severe thunderstorms and tornadoes… I thought I’d check it out so I took off from Nashville while the city was in the midst of a very severe storm and this was the sky with live weather turned on… How are we in MSFS 2024 and such a critical piece of immersion is the weather, yet it’s still so very bad?
It concerns me that they never talk about it or even acknowledge it… It’s not working and hasn’t been for a long time… Did they make a horrible decision in whoever they partnered with for live weather injection and they don’t even want to comment on it? Bottom line is it needs to improve.
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Meteoblue wont tell their accuracy, unfortunately.
Here in the southwest it seems to be right on.
The clouds and winds seem to be accurate. It still lacks severely in depicting thunderstorms. In fact I have never seen lightning in FS24 real weather.
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The live weather in MSFS 2024 is based on a forecast model and will never be a true real-time representation of the weather you see right now when you look out the window. In particular, predicting the exact location of thunderstorm cells is virtually impossible even with the supercomputers used to create a weather model.
What is feasible with current technology in MSFS, however, is a broadly accurate large-scale representation of current weather conditions. You can’t ask for more and, in my experience, MSFS 2024 does this with sufficient accuracy.
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Copied that!
The next level would be the real world.
MS/Asobo are performing pretty well.
I know there are still flaws here and there but overall I’m a happy sim pilot
Happy 
If its live weather and they’re using forecast models, isn’t that a contradiction? Theres plenty of data sources to get and generate the current weather. AWC has live METARs from around the world. NOAA STAR/NESDIS has satellite data that can be used to generate cloud over in a horizontal coverage for both North and South America. I’ve seen some egregiously inaccurate live weather in FS2024.
so a short clarification !
MSFS used a pure forecast method until SU5 (MSFS2020) - and the weather looked far better then (not talking about accuracy).
Then it was switched to a METAR / forecast / method apparently then supported by satellite images, at least as announced by Jörg. Unfortunately it is so buggy (not always) that you don’t even know what it is. Yes, in certain METAR areas where the data is sufficient it seems to work well in some cases, because in US METAR data for clouds above 5000 feet is also given - unfortunately not in the EU area, so it’s more or less hit and miss.
In addition, cloud bands, e.g. storms ETC, can no longer be depicted as a homogeneous structure.
In addition, there is no vertical extension of the clouds between the METAR stations, which leads me to the conclusion that it is actually a pure METAR method and something like that is simply inadequate. However, this is the first time since SU1 that I have had a cloud cover over a METAR station that had no data, but this is not always the case. I live near a small airport, so I can roughly control that - and X-Plane 12 is always a lot closer to what I see out the window.
But nobody really knows, because neither Seb nor anyone else has spoken out on the subject recently. Joerg has announced that it will be possible to track phenomena such as tornadoes or storms - but it seems to me that none of this has been implemented. But it also seems to me that the weather resolution has become lower anyway (clouds at night are transparent from above, clouds in the distance from above look like they have poor resolution, etc.) - perhaps because of the bandwidth, performance ??
I still see these METAR holes etc. etc.
Above all, however, the areas with several metar stations seem to be problematic, because the forecast does not seem to come into play there because the distance is too small, and especially if these stations have no data, no clouds are simply displayed even if there are some on satellite images and since the METAR apparently has the upper hand, they are simply ‘removed’.
I think that’s why there are these different impressions about the weather. If you’re in the right area, it’s just right, and elsewhere it’s not.
At least that’s my observation.
As I’ve said before, it’s a matter of opinion - some load the flight, see a few clouds in the sky that might look very good in MSFS too, no question, and for them the weather works. But the fact that the values for RWR visibility, for example, are not available in a simulator or that you can fly through a storm (if it is represented) without lightning and with a Cessna (no dangerous weather im MSFS) doesn’t seem to bother them etc, etc. - so of course you can be happy.
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I love the seasonal changes. Flying out of Las Vegas a few days ago I was seeing the greening up of the desert foliage just like it should be this time of year. Here in the PNW I’ve made a few flights into the Cascade mountains to check out snow levels. Love the fact we have Winter snow, but have to agree the accuracy needs improvement. It does not consistently match reality or the forecast. In fact a few days ago with a snow level of ~1,500 feet I flew towards Mt. Hood following Hwy 26. I had just checked a weather cam in Welches, Or. When I got there the snow cover in the simulator was a perfect match to reality as seen on the camera. A few minutes later further up the mountain in elevation the weather suddenly reset. All the snow went away up to near the tree line on Mt. Hood. A ski area that reports 80" suddenly was bare. So live weather can get it right but it is very inconsistent and still needs work.
My current weather at EPWR (around 12:00am local time) real vs sim. MS… You had one job…
It’s umptientth time it happens…
Can’t upload more than one pic at a time
Clouds with vertical development are sorely needed… right now there is no “go/no-go” decision able to be made in MSFS- it just doesn’t matter. XP12 has made strides in this department- you actually have to think about wind, turbulence, precip, runway condition.
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