is there a possibility to purchase it in sim update 6?!?
That’s because the mountain peaks around LSZS report snow coverage, then the ■■■■■■ data from Meteo Blue generates huge snow coverage around the entire region. And Asobo don’t filter that data based on TEMP or ALT. Voilà, the perfect summer snow coverage. Known since 7 years, Asobo doesn’t care.
I have been doing some testing around the Mount Cook / Aoraki region and thought I’d share an observation that may be relevant to the ongoing discussion about snow coverage.
What stood out to me is that the simulator’s seasonal snow depiction around Mount Cook actually appears to be quite good. With Live Weather disabled and using the current date/month options, the sim depicts snow coverage. The snowline and coverage moves up and down the mountains throughout the year in a way that looks broadly realistic. In winter, snow extends much further down the slopes, while in summer it retreats to the higher elevations, glaciers and permanent snowfields. Scrolling through the months clearly shows this seasonal progression.
However, when Live Weather is enabled, that seasonal depiction appears to be overridden or covered by the live snow coverage layer. Around Mount Cook this often results in snow extending much lower than expected, down into valley areas where it would not normally be present during the warmer months.
One thing I found interesting is that temperature doesn’t seem to be a factor here. The extent of the ground snow coverage doesn’t appear to respond in a way that would suggest the sim is dynamically adjusting the snowline based on current temperatures. Instead, it seems more like the Live Weather system is applying a separate snow coverage dataset that takes precedence over the underlying but more accurate seasonal model.
Given that the seasonal snow depiction already appears to produce a reasonably realistic result for Mount Cook, I wonder whether the issue is less about creating a better snow model and more about how the live snow coverage layer interacts with the existing seasonal system.
Ideally, it would be great if there were a way to retain all the benefits of Live Weather, such as winds, pressure, temperature, clouds and precipitation, while either reducing the influence of the live snow coverage layer or allowing the seasonal snow depiction to remain dominant where it provides a more realistic result.
The below video shows the seasonal snow coverage, when not covered by the incorrect live depiction.
This all already well documented, discussed and brought to the attention of Asobo/MS. It’s still the same problem that we had in FS2020: in live weather the sim uses current snow maps at such a low resolution that it can’t place the snow precisely where it should and shouldn’t (!) be. Instead of just the mountain tops, the snow spills into a wider region, down into the valleys.
The only difference is that FS2024 has built in snow layers that are dependend on the date you set the simulation to. This is what provides the snow without live weather. FS2020 didn’t have that. Unfortunately Live Weather simply drapes the coarse, wildly inaccurate current snow layer on top of that, with the known results, that basically make Live Weather completely unusuable during the summer time in mountainous regions that still have snow capped mountains sometimes. Instead you get full snow coverage in 30 °C / 86 °F heat for example.
This should have been fixed years ago, in one way or another. A simple toggle to manually turn off snow entirely in Live Weather would suffice. This could probably be progammed in a couple of hours, because you already can toggle snow on and off at will in Custom Weather, but they really, really, really don’t care.
2024, Sim Update 5 beta.
Snow at ≈1000 feet in Knight Inlet, BC, whereas temperature is around 19° C on June 12th.
And yet they won’t give full weather control to 3rd party, because REASONS. While ActiveSky, for example, at least knows that snow melts when it’s warm.
Description of the issue:
Unfortunately, snow coverage in live weather is still fundamentally broken.
This issue has been reported for about five years. It then took at least two years until Asobo acknowledged it in a livestream and told us that they would talk to the data providers to get more accurate data, because more accurate data is out there. We all know it. It exists.
Asobo confirmed it, and they told us, I think it was in late 2023, that they would talk to the data provider and implied, without promising, though, that we could expect much better snow coverage without these annoying bugs in 2024.
That never happened. We never heard of this issue again. We have no idea if they ever talked to the data provider or not. We don’t know why they never fixed it. We don’t know if they are planning on fixing it. There’s just silence on this issue, at least as far as I know. Feel free to correct me if I missed something.
Some good examples are the Swiss Alps areas around Eiger, Mönch, Jungfrau, and Grindelwald, as well as the whole Zermatt/Matterhorn area. Both of these areas are constantly, all year long, covered in snow, even in the valleys.
This is, of course, absolutely ridiculous, especially in the hottest summer on record in 2026. There is no snow up to pretty much at least 3,000 meters (approximately 9,843 feet) above sea level, but in the sim, everything is covered in snow, even in the valleys. It looks absolutely ridiculous.
The funny thing is that Jörg Neumann once said in a livestream that the whole Eiger/Grindelwald area is his favorite area in the sim to fly, so he should have noticed this issue whenever he flies there. But that seems not to be reason enough to fix it.
I really hope we finally get better snow coverage data.
This is by no means an issue limited to these two Swiss areas. It’s also an issue in New Zealand. It’s an issue in Norway, and it’s also an issue in Alaska, for example in the Denali region.
Below, you will find a couple of screenshots that show the live weather with the wrong snow coverage in the sim in August 2026, followed by some screenshots, of course from the real locations, with webcam screenshots that show that there is, of course, no snow at all during this summer. There is never snow there in the summer anyway, but especially not in this summer.
Will we ever, ever get proper, plausible snow coverage in the mentioned areas and, of course, in many other broken areas?
Again, better snow coverage data exists. They should just use it. And if they don’t use it, at least tell us why and what other tricks they could use to fix it either way, even if they can’t use better data for cost reasons or whatever the reason may be.
Weather: Live
FREQUENCY OF ISSUE
Every time
REPRODUCTION STEPS
Please list clear steps you took in order to help our test team reproduce the same issue:
- Fly over Zermatt, Grindelwald, Denali, or many other snow covered reagions
YOUR SETTINGS
Live weather
MEDIA
All screenshots AND live webcam screenshots from same areas/viewpoints in Grindelwald on August 22nd 2026
Can fully confirm snow coverage the whole year long at Grindelwald-Interlaken- and Zermattareas with liveweather. I have an appartment from May to October and even temperatures are over 30’s in summer, liveweather shows snow coverage for this area the whole year long. We get so many updates during the year, can’t understand why since over 5 years this issues are not getting solved with a fix by Asobo.
It’s really pathetic that this is still going on.
Having areas included in World Updates with detailed airport scenery that are affected by this boggles my mind. (NZ and Nepal come to mind)
The fact that we can’t fly into Lukla of all places with Live Weather on (unless you want it under an unrealistic cover of snow) leaves me speechless. Such an important place in world aviation… its beyond disappointing now 
If they are unable to source the higher resolution data, at least give us a toggle or detting to disable snow coverage in love weather
@dSAFDancer Unfortunately that’s all I’m hoping for now, an ON/OFF toggle for snow cover with Live Weather. How sad
PAWD, surface temperature 19 celsius. Icy snowy wasteland.
Asobo, pleeeeeeease, when are you going to fix this…
I am having this issue with iceland specifly, its september and there is snow all the way down and even in like july and other summer months it shows to much snow.