Can someone tell me, is there a way to tell how old the weather is that MSFS is using, and what station its pulling it from?
I’m doing a flight right now.. metar is
CYQM 261700Z 12008KT 15SM OVC087 06/M03 A3037 RMK AC8 SLP291
But MSFS weather has the clouds, right now, at around 3500 feet or so… trying to stay below it.
Something is definitely off with the weather.. it needs to get more up to date to fly properly with vatsim, etc.
Edit: Is it possible that meteo blue is using future weather forecast?
The forecast was calling for what i’m sort of seeing in MSFS right now, but doesnt reflect the actual METAR..
As far as I know, MSFS uses that kind of data but is (for some reason) not always on point. There seems to be a delay or misinterpretation or something.
I see you’re using allmetsat.com. I may be wrong but I assume that both allmetsat and meteoblue are obtaining METAR (current) and TAF (forecast) data from the same sources (Edit: which are the actual weather stations near the aerodromes).
Note that this kind of data isn’t a 100% “live” either. I believe it’s obtained every 30 to 60 minutes.
Side note: you might want to check out the actual METAR/TAF data stings below the tables. They will give you more info like actual wind directions in degrees and things like that. You can learn how to decipher them e. g. on Wikipedia.
No one knows but the developers, hopefully, they can answer some of those questions during the next Q&A. The problem is that we were told that the weather would be “live” and “real-time” and for many of us, that is simply not the case.
Currently trying to plan any sort of flight with real-world data is impossible. Instead, I have to load up the game and go to each airport and see if VFR is even possible.
Honestly, I don’t pay much attention to the accuracy of the Live Weather in the sim, and the only time it bothers me even a little is when I get ATIS information, and the cloud levels that ATIS gives out don’t match what I’m seeing, but in 95% of my flights, I’m only using Live Weather to give me a more realistic and organic appearance to the clouds, and not much else.
What I mean is, I can use one of the weather presets (and I still do, depending on my mood), or one of the presets I’ve created, but those conditions, as beautiful as they can be, are still consistent during the entire flight, no matter how far I fly. But, with Live Weather, I can see very realistic-looking variations in the cloud types and densities along the route, flying from cloudy or overcast regions into areas of clear skies, and vice versa. I’ve seen some really incredible and unique sky scenery this way.
Does it match the conditions that the same place in the real world is experiencing? I honestly don’t bother to look because it makes no difference to me. The weather in FS 2020 could be completely synthetically generated by an AI system, and I’d be fine with that so long as it was realistic. (Honestly, I’d like to see a synthetic weather generation system as an option alongside Live Weather and user presets.)
I really don’t concern myself much with the meteorological conditions that Live Weather presents as far as a flying challenge goes. If there’s a thunderstorm ahead, I’m usually too lazy to change my course and I just fly right into it anyway.
Great story, why are you posting in this thread exactly?
Is anyone getting any better live weather? Just watched today’s live stream and they said multiple times that airport data was strickly derived from METAR data and not Meteoblue, and they fixed a serverside caching issue that was causing delayed weather.
If they are in fact using METAR data that is updated every 30 minutes as stated, we should be expecting live real-time weather at the airports.
Just did a check and my local airport has live weather in-game matching weather at least 6 hours old. I guess that’s better than the usual 12-hour delay?
I was hoping that your sarcasm wouldn’t be necessary anymore…!
I’ve currently not the time to test MSFS. Has anyone here a chance to check higher-elevation airports like KTEX, whether or not they addressed the temperature and pressure problem?
After the announcement, I checked a few airports around the US, France, and Spain last night. The weather “felt” a bit better maybe, but the winds, visibility levels, fog were off. I thought that sure LFPG would be accurate, but no. One positive, I didn’t see any lightning except at PHOG, but then I looked at the radar/satellite data and behold, there was lightning in the area. I don’t know if the lightning issue is maybe part of the caching issue that was mentioned. They have also said that the weather is only partially fixed, so I’m holding on to hope. They seem to know there is more work to be done.
Like we’ve been asked for, I’ve created a new topic for this specific issue. I’m not sure if we can get any attention for this one, even though it’s easily reproducible and clearly a bug…
It’s true that ATIS info can’t be trusted assuming it’s working at all, because for example in Greece’s major international airport LGAV ATIS frequency remains silent all the time. The thing is that I don’t trust external sites either because what they give as real world info doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll be reflected in the game. Therefore it’s of little benefit.
Live weather is very inconsistent. I’m doing continuous flights due to my OnAir jobs, and I’ve lost the count of times I’ve landed in an airport at horrible weather conditions, complete the job, then go back to the main menu, load the next part of my trip starting from the same airport and literally 5 minutes later the exact same place has perfectly fine clear weather. Other times I go to a place which has an off scale baro setting such as 30.30 or whatever, then go back to the menu again, resume the flight and baro has dropped to 29.92 within seconds.
This doesn’t make sense… I only wonder if local time doesn’t play a role in this, because it seems to be wrong in some places (currently flying in Greece and the game gives a local time of UTC +1 when the correct value would be +2). EDIT: that’s partially true, UTC +1 seems to apply to the western part of the country but as I was going east then it suddenly changed to UTC +2, curious. It should have been the latter throughout the flight. Anyway, that’s the least of my issues.
It’s quite sometimes when you don’t get life weather working after completion of first flight and start of second from main menu. That was probably the reason of clear skies and standard pressure with couple mins difference for you. I couldn’t track why its happening. And in my case the fix is to restart the game or log out / log in x box account from sim main menu.
Thanks for the hint. So if there’s no point in quitting to main menu after the first flight (e.g. if I’m doing VFRs and don’t need to set up a flight plan), I think I’ll just continue from where I landed in the first place and simply reset fuel and cargo.
