I also noticed that. Unfortunately, this is due to the lower layer of clouds that is connected with fog. Set rain for a while and move this layer upwards then it won’t be foggy anymore, but it won’t rain anymore either. That is wrong and needs to be improved will. Because rain falls down from the cloud anyway. Rain and clouds / fog must be set separately.
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here a Pic from Aldo Lema, Uruguay in Summer rain:
not as bad as in your screenshots, but still very low visibility.
Again: check the METAR. The SIm is reproducing the reported visibilty from there.
When the Airport reports rain witn Visibility 10nm and you get 1nm in sim i’d understand.
But without aeronautical data like a METAR report, i cannot blame the sim for bad reproduction just because I dont like the weather…
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I don’t think it’s directly related to METAR visibility value because we got almost the same unrealistically excessive fog with both rain preset and live weather… as a friend also stated above it might stem from the the clouds generating the rain only when they are unrealistically close to the ground.
true, it may be.
But we will not know until we make a match between in Sim weather and current METAR by eg. tuning ATIS on.
Comparing in SIm with what it looks like out the window is understandable but not helpful. As the SIM can only process data it gets.
So focus has to be to have it replicate according to official data until there is a technique to analyize worldwide webcams and process this. 
I think that methodology should have already been carried out by the dev team, but it seems they failed to conduct such in-depth tests to realistically implement the METAR data into the sim.
I agree rain and low visibility is very realistic. I would also agree as I live in the UK and I’ve done quite a bit of sailing in the English Channel that rain with completely overcast conditions does not automatically mean low visibility - when I say low I mean less than 500 meters.
Infact it’s quite common here in the UK to have visibility when it’s raining of 2 or 3 miles, you could get visibility beyond that but the skies would have to be broken.
How does this relate to the sim. Well I can get the sim to show rain AND have reasonable visibility if I play around with scattered clouds, it becomes much more difficult when overcast. You can raise the height of the cloud base but that lessens the rain - you can’t reliably get the picture below in MSFS for example.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the preset but personally I would have had more visibility varibility in the rain preset as it’s realistic but not much fun, if the sim can’t do that, then that’s a problem. Just my 2 cent. 
We need to be aware of, that a METAR is only a momentarily picture of a situation, which only gets update every 30 min. (when there´s no special METAR of course) and 30 min. are a very long time to change the entire local weather.
As the devs say: we are just at the beginning of a long journey 
Rome wasn´t build on one day, too. I´m very positive that there will be a lot of improvements in the future
I agree that this revolutionary sim is at the very first stages of its journey, however the visibility in rainy weather has always been much more realistic in its predecessors, namely FS9 and FSX, so why should we bother and waste time here so much on about such an issue that should have already come solved by and large ?
Yeah that’s my point, even in a fog-doomed British Isle the situation is so… far from realistic. The above photo is a nice example, heavy rain yet not that bad of a visibility.
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you miss the point.
not every heavy rain gives low visibility like not every heavy rain is leaving good visibility.
There is no golden rule for it anywhere in the world.
Visibility is a variable on it’s own, even though it clearly is influenced by rain and other occurences.
The only thing that should influence the visibility is the reported visibility. And for aviation this is done through METARS.
When METAR reports rain and 10+ NM of visibilty, it should show up accordingly in sim.
When METAR reports light rain and 1 NM visibility, this should be the situation in the sim.
Not more, not less.
So compare your SIM with METAR instead of your personal preferences before judging the realism.
When there is a general, rreaccuring mismatch, then you have a case. Else not.
Well the point is clearly that almost every meaningfully dense rain scenario in the sim creates incredibly unrealistic low visibility… that’s it.
If it would be a stable/median value and could not be set differently and/or variably for each precipitation scenario due to coding limitations, which currently is the case, the dev team should increase it by a certain degree to meet an average realism.
OK, I back off
This is exactly what I mean about high clouds. The rain is much reduced, you can’t get a lot of rain this way. I think I spotted three drops in the entire picture
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Wait a minute, I can count five droplets, tho
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will try again when i get in to more rain.
I just happened to have light rain and accordingly visibility even was within VMC.
I never has the feeling of unrealistic simulation when Live Weather was working but never checked back if it matches with current METAR
Will have an eye on it, but for now I can say that visibilty and rain work well together from my perspective and experience with IRL flying ( even though i only flew in europe myself so far)
The simulator has no implementation of visibility or humidity as far as I can tell. Yes, the visibility changes with different weather, and moisture in the air is depicted in the form of clouds and rain. But the Live Weather data, whether it’s coming from a METAR or a numerical forecast model, appears to have no effect on these variables. When clear of clouds or precip, the visibility is always unlimited, and the dewpoint is always the default value. The problem is I have no idea what actual data Flight Simulator is using, or what it intends to do with it. The weather system is a black box mystery. But I suspect this is the underlying and more fundamental issue here, not that the rain itself is causing unrealistic visibility conditions.
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A different and more elaborate and maybe more in-depth point of view to understanding the underlying reason for the unrealistic visibility issue during precipitation.
Thanks.
Thank you, a very good summary.
I think we all agree, that in game weather should match the real world reports, however this is achieved.
Obviously sometimes, in some places it for some of us it works pretty well, and sometimes it doesn’t.
There is no doubt, that the MSFS weather engine - while very ambitious - i needing a lot of work to be near perfect.
Unfortunately they seem very restricted by the data METEOBLU is providing.
Take the snow coverage. It works pretty well in Europe but not in other parts of the world.
I checked the METEOBLU website and their charts, and there you can see, that there is simply “no data available” for estimated snow coverage in North-America.
So I am pretty sure, the Sim is working quite well but simply isnt provided with the required data.
And this lack of data for some regions might cause the “visibility in rain” issue as well.
Yep but I’m not convinced what sort of part METEOBLUE might be playing with the rendition of the rain clouds set way too low to the ground.
The sim’s weather engine is the most probable culprit here.
Clouds only create heavy rain when they are almost on the ground, that’s the source of the whole unrealistic visibility hassle.