You don’t even have to compare it with METAR or the real weather you see outside. Just having the lowest cloud bases all on ground level tells you, that there is a bug in the system, regardless of where they get the information.
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Yes, I saw the same in MSFS today. I also checked LOWS, and it wasn’t that bad either - aside from a missing low overcast layer which I have yet to see. It’s trending in the right direction, but I fear we have a long journey ahead when it comes to the accuracy of cloud coverage and visbility,.
Great example for the difficulties of a METAR based weather rendering: CAVOK means no significant cloud coverage BELOW 5000ft AGL, and your webcam picture illustrates that where many simmers would assume blue skies there can very well be several cloud layers, even overcast.
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I’m not sure if anyone else has the same experience, but the weather seems to be looking better today.
For example, I can now see overcast again:
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Are clouds rendering at the correct altitude now?
They definitely seem to be more accurate in terms of their overall altitude and coverage, haven’t tested thoroughly enough though to say it’s definitely fixed. Seems to be improved though compared to what I was seeing on SU7 release day.
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Just done a departure out of Manchester and I have to say it looked very nice, and pretty accurate to the current conditions around this area.
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Any issues with haze/fog pop-ins?
None so far, but that could be that I’ve not flown past any areas with such weather. It’s pretty clear across England today, I will keep an eye out though 
The question is of course if the whole weather pattern simply consists of these cumulus clouds of different degrees of coverage and at different heights and same extents - then we have METAR based engine but with corrected cloud heights (AGL) ! I will start a test myself and report back !!!
Thanks anyway!
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well the “METAR” test:
METAR: LOWW 221620Z 32009KT 9999 -RA FEW012 BKN050 06/05 Q1020 NOSIG
so now this is a great example WHY METAR is not suitable (alone) as an “ACCURATE” weather engine (apart from the same values you need for e.g. VATSIM flying), it doesn’t get any better than this example !
In reality we have a closed cloud cover, even if METAR says - BKN5000 and 1200FEW - it is mostly in nature (except for exceptions) a closed cloud cover !!! (this is also the case in reality because cloud expansion is never correctly represented by any values. Up to LOXT (I drove the route in real on the way home) - it was a closed cloud cover and pretty miserable visibility!
this is what it looks like in the sim, should be light rain:
It’s the same weather, I just adjusted the time manually so that you can see the clouds!
and this is exactly what I have been trying to explain to people since FSX and various weather engines came out, do it again here (because FS2004 and AS6.5 did it pretty well)
The advantage of MSFS is of course that the clouds are really “3D” and not bitmap based.
The weather is displayed correctly according to the METAR, but does not look “real” (or accurate) because the BKN5000 and the FEW1200 are probably closely meshed and it is not the same as in nature. (in this case, presumably a closed cloud cover). in addition, the low visibility is due to the light rain, which is not visible here at all, and nothing is “correct” any more - except that the images look quite “dramatic”.
In any case, rain with closed cloud cover looks different!
First of all, it was raining at the airport (in real) and I didn’t have rain because there was no cloud exactly above the runway (BKN5000) !
BUT something has definitely been changed, it has definitely become a little better !
It is just a fact that such a weather (if it was accurate) looked more “realistic” before SU7 and that´s it!
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Yes I would on the whole probable agree here, it’s still not great, but something seems to have changed indeed
…I really hope you are joking, right?
I cannot believe that. LOL. I hope they won’t be that stupid. That’s really not gonna happen, for sure. Live weather means: 20-30 min delay is ok and will be tolerated because it’s what people are used in the actual sims. I think the best for you would be to stop flying on Vatsim if you want historical weather. I cannot imagine the number sof users lost if Vatsim would use a 2 day-old-weather. I guess it would be the end of that network.
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did anybody tried to uninstall the game and reinstall it? just to see if it could solve the weather problem? I read online that somebody did that and said to have solved the problem?! I don’t know if it’s true as the majority of people are unaware of the issue anyway.
Thats a good question but i actually never heard something very positive about these weather-tools until yet. And since there isn’t any good airliner to fly anyway, i will wait for a better third-party weather tool to be available. In the meantime i have more fun using other sims and am very excited about XP12 coming hopefully in the next 3-4months.
I used the default weather of XP to fly on Vatsim many years, yes. But now i am using ASXP.
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I have had the same issue. I had it set on live weather but actual sim conditions were like the ‘Clear skies’ preset.
Nothing I could do would fix it, I tried disabling and re-enabling online functionality, loading in with clear skies and then toggling live weather on, and restarting my sim. All to no avail.
45 minutes later it just suddenly started working again.
I am surprised you feel me wanting a weather engine simulating real world weather by its behavior to be unreasonable.
A METAR based weather engine will not behave like the real weather, because the real weather doesn’t work that way.
Some people care about the realism of the timeline, other about the realism of functionality. We can’t have both right now so I opt for the latter, since thats a vital part of operating an aircraft and if that’s off, so will the flight simulation be.
Yes Vatsim is a problem, because it uses a different source and a different way of collecting weather information. That’s why I am offering solutions for the entire community without MSFS weather engine’s potential being compromised.
Because right now it seems it IS being compromised to appease online flyers.
And I too fly online, but I rather have the timing of the weather being compromised rather than the correct simulation of it. I seriously don’t know how that can be an unreasonable request.
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Agree! Metar is static not dynamic and does not decide the real weather. It’s a report of real weather and that real weather is dynamic. Meteoblue weather is also static data but it includes every spot on earth. Metar only include the weather station that observe the weather at that tiny spot on earth. It’s much weather between those spots that is not covered in METAR.
The old 10km or more visibility, I think not. Stupid weather, what a step backwards. Where oh where is the testing?
Exactly, 5000 ft or highest MSA so you would still need Meteoblue for everything above that, same for cloud tops (METAR only gives base / ceiling) and visibility above 10 km.
Thats why you need both!
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