So all day yesterday and most of the night the front range around Denver was hit with snow. We didn’t get dumped on but we definitely got enough to cover roads, fields and grass. The foothills are covered and the major peaks have been white for days. What is the tolerance for the game to display snow? Everything but the tallest peaks are still green and brown?
I always fly with live weather.
Had snow in Alamosa, Leadville, Aspen and Telluride yesterday.
yeah when you get to those that are well within the range it is ok in parts but I’m talking specifically like Denver and the foothills. They are covered yesterday and today and there is nothing in game.
We have a snow storm hitting the midwest. In particular KIOW is covered in snow, and there is heavy snow fall (since lunch time today). In the sim, no snow fall and no snow cover. (Live weather, etc.) Something is wrong with live weather…
This is probably difficult for the game to manage. It uses live weather reports, which tell it current conditions. This generally only includes the current weather happening in the air.
There are also reports available for precipitation intensity and even accumulation. However, there’s no way for the game to predict what the ground will look like an hour later, a day later, or a month later. We could have a blizzard in Colorado and the road or maybe terrain is melted and steaming by noon that same day. However, in a cold snap or maybe in Montana or Canada, that snow might be there for weeks. That would be very difficult to track and/or predict for software like this.
Regarding live weather, there are several thoughts here:
Are you checking weather from a civilian source or actual aerodrome (airport) condition monitor or forecast known as METAR’s and TAF’s? The game likely only uses the aviation data since civilian weather sources can vary wildly and, in my experience, are usually less accurate.
There is also no weather sensor at your house. I live 15 minutes from an airport, and 15 minutes from my parents on the Front Range in CO. Given the way storms move and how wide the precipitation band is, I may get several inches more snow (at roughly the same elevation) than the airport or my parents’ place. The game likely only actually knows what is going on at that local airport…and actually not even that. The local airport does not have any weather prediction service (at least not yet). the nearest airports with that kind of forecast are KCYS, KDEN, or KBJC. That’s a 100 mile gap.
Food for thought. I’m not 100% convinced yet. I have only had a couple days to tinker with MSFS 2020 so far and weather seems to be way better than the old FSX. And, as a former software engineer, I never expect a simulator to perfectly reflect reality.
Well the latest update was supposed to change all of that so that real weather accumulation was to show up. Lots of people reported it working great in places like Minnesota and Europe. Not so much for Colorado. I did see an improvement at much higher elevation but that was like 10000ft and above. between 5-9000ft not much has changed. It did show flurries yesterday but nothing on the ground.
Check the snow data on the Meteoblue website. That’s where the sim is getting it’s weather data from.
After several days of testing I can tell where one will probably encounter snow. As far as I can tell the simulator uses the data from the map that depicts snowfall in the last 24 hrs. I think it also looks to the snowdepth data charts. When there is just a little snowdepth (few cm) the sim shows just some white roads and some patches on mostly green fields. With higher snowdepths it will cover the whole landscape in snow. Furthermore it seems that it also looks at temperature. Today I had a flight from ENNO to the Sogndal in Norway. According to Meteoblue the departure airport was currently in a temperature zone just above freezing point but had a lot of snowfall in the past 24 hrs.
Upon entering the cockpit it was raining lightly but the airfield was covered in snow. According to Meteoblue the destination field had almost clear skies but lay in a temperature zone well below freezing point. The map showed that it did not have significant snowfall in the past 24 hrs, but according to snowdepth data there should already be a lot of snow from the past days. With temps below freezing it should still be there. Sure enough. When I arrived at the destination the weather was almost clear and the beautifull airport on the edge of the fjord was heavily covered in snow…
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