This is how weather looked before SU5 in MSFS2020. We can clearly see high altitude overcast. Now it’s impossible to see it.
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ISSUE DESCRIPTION
Description of the issue: Since 02nd January, Live weather injection over the UK and Ireland appears to be working but injecting incorrect data and not live data.
Take for example today, 03rd January 2024 at 10:30UTC, Central and Southern England has clear skies as can be confirmed by Satellite cover and also METARs reporting NCD or CAVOK (although not always an indicator of clear skies in this case satellite cloud cover confirms). Forecast data also called for clear skies.
In MSFS however live weather is injecting loads of cloud in these areas when it should not be there, ranging from broken to overcast clouds. It would appear the data is from the wrong day?
MSFS cloud cover:
Actual Satellite cloud cover:
EGBB for example:
EGTK Oxford:
Actual conditions should be clear:
Provide specific location or coordinates:
It is particularly evident at central and southern aerodromes such as:
EGKK
EGSS
EGGW
EGLL
EGNX
EGBB
All of which should be showing clear skies but has lots of cloud cover.
Provide time and date of the observed weather issue: It started 02nd January 2025 and can be observed again today 03rd January 2025, 1030UTC.
[PC Only] Did you remove all your community mods/add-ons? If yes, are you still experiencing the issue?
FREQUENCY OF ISSUE
How often does this occur for you (Example: Just once, every time on sim load, intermittently)? Every time since yesterday.
REPRODUCTION STEPS
Please list clear steps you took in order to help our test team reproduce the same issue:
- Load live weather at a central or southern UK airport such as EGKK, EGLL, EGBB, EGNX
- Lots of cloud cover loads in and can also be observed on world map
- Cloud cover should not be present.
YOUR SETTINGS
If the issue still occurs with no mods and add-ons, please continue to report your issue. If not, please move this post to the User Support Hub.
What peripherals are you using, if relevant:
[PC Only] Are you using Developer Mode or have you made any changes to it?
[PC, MSFS 2020 Only] Are you using DX11 or DX12?
[PC Only] What GPU (Graphics Card) do you use?
[PC Only] What other relevant PC specs can you share?
MEDIA
Please add a screenshot or video of the issue occurring.
[END OF FIRST USER REPORT]
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Do you have the same issue if you follow the OP’s steps to reproduce it?
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Provide extra information to complete the original description of the issue:
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This might be off topic but I feel the clouds are way too scattered.
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Update at 1200 UTC back to being wrong again with cloud injected all over the UK.
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Satellite photo from about 17 minutes ago.
Something you don’t see very often are banks of clouds, and the only time I have seen that recently was in conjunction with the Active Sky addon.
You won’t see it as long as you try to represent the clouds only with accumulations of more or less cumulus-like clouds and only with one type of cloud !
You can clearly see this on the world map, too!
Especially on the real satellite photo you can see cloud cover where the clouds are and not like here this transparent, repeating pattern ! You can also see here that the cloud density is simply not sufficient ! Why there is not simply a slider for the cloud density for Live Weather is not clear to me - I know they want to reduce the grainy clouds - but at the expense of the density it is unfortunately not right, I don’t mind the grainy clouds as long as the weather is represented better.
BR !
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Pre-SU5/7 you would get proper banks of cloud, with far more variety than we have now, even in 2024.
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I was just about to mention that too!
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Not sure why my post about data injection was merged into this one, my post has nothing to do with depiction of overcast cloud. Mine is about a very clear data injection bug that affects ALL weather.
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Maybe think about giving REX WeatherForce a try? I purchased it years ago and have never been disappointed with it! It does overcast really well. 
Rex WeatherForce use msfs 2024 presets and we can have high altitude overcat with the presets.
OP here… Well, I’ve just had a lovely 20 minute flight. Best clouds I’ve seen in 2024 so far, and really like the pre SU5 clouds we had in 2020.
So the sim CAN do it, this was live weather. It did layers, cloud banks and high overcast.
So something is definitely wrong at certain times the injection is messed up. It is so long since I saw banks of cloud like this in either sim.
I wish it looked like this more often, it was really enjoyable and immersive.
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Yes, the question here is, is there a METAR station nearby?
Perhaps the problem (as always with pure METAR between the stations) is that if too many stations are too close together, the forecast is simply interpolated incorrectly with METAR ?
Good theory and I could go along with that. There is only one metar station in that area. So yes, I wonder if when there are lots close together the sim cannot inject them all correctly. I’ve been saying since SU5 if I could go back to the pure meteoblue weather and ditch the metar injection completely I would!
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Yeah there are definitely data bugs and discrepancies/inconsistencies at play, which makes if so inconsistent.
My experience on 2 Jan feeds into this topic I think. I am in the UK but chose to fly in NZ (21.00GMT so roughly 08.00L) I spawned C&D at Nelson (NZNS) - no METAR available but ATIS mirrored the visible conditions. ATIS Wind Calm: Alt 29.70": Few clouds 4800; Few clouds 4800, Few clouds 9000, Ceiling 18000 Broken. Started up (F6F Hellcat) and requested taxi “Airfield is currently IFR Permission Denied”. Ignored weather and flew anyway. Forty five minutes low level and made my way around to Woodbourne (NZWB) where I requested permission to land “Airfield is currently IFR Permission Denied”. Landed anyway. no issues with controlability in what, I subsequently discovered (METAR from Wellington) would have been a 16kt crosswind. component.
I do very much get the sense that FS2020 has been sacrificed on the alter of FS2024’s bugged intro.
Where were you flying there?
Snowdonia in Wales. Departed Llanbedr and flew north towards Snowdon. Looks good in the sim.
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I don’t think that completely explains it as some of my best weather experiences with multiple levels realistically laid out have been in the Vancouver to Seattle region and also the Chicago area and also the Baltimore MD area. New York sometimes has good weather representation. Whether any of these representations matched reality is another issue entirely.
I think thunderstorms in areas with many METARs are a problem for the sim. I think areas with the fewest sources of weather data probably have the best representations overall (like New Zealand). I think the upper overcast layer issues must have started when they started using satellite data for cloud placement but thats entirely a guess. I’m still not happy with the clouds they are using for upper levels (not the new cirrus) as they look a mess much of the time.
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