Anybody here participating in the current beta?
How does the changed turbulences and drafts feel?
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Really. They need to just add an adjustment slider for this. Then everyone is happy.
It’s not clear whether this affects what Asobo thinks are thermals, which may or may not already be in the sim (although non-topographic rising air clearly IS already in the sim). It will be very easy to test that after SU10 though - setting the wind to zero either will or won’t kill the thermals and the variometers will clearly show that. If the thermals disappear along with other ‘turbulence & drafts’ that will be wrong but we just have to know to set a minimum wind speed of 3 knots for any soaring weather.
Hopefully it’ll all come out ok in the end. The best test IMHO is to fly a decent glider in the weather and see if the vario makes sense.
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did you create this on your own expirences or is this something official?
These are the results of my study of the simvar of the AMBIENT WIND Y using the Simvars.exe program, which is included in the MSFS SDK kit.
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The middle statement on that chart appears to be wrong unless the extra up and downdrafts are due solely to increased surface winds caused by more heat. E.g. glide over Madrid realtime on a sunny midday and then morning or evening and you will notice a huge difference.
The diagram given above concerns exclusively cloud thermals.
In the absence of clouds, thermals are formed over some surfaces.
The dependence of their speed on the time of day is given below:
Negative vertical flows are up to -100 ft/min (-0.5 m/s).
They are present along the perimeter of the clouds and above the surfaces with vegetation and water areas.
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with SU10 some small changes gonna happen and with SU11 everythings gonna change according to the latest Q&A’s. Gonna be interesting how your charts gonna change 
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Because the release will be late in the year,I think we’ll have to go to Africa to get decent thermals (that’s if Asobo get it right).I have presets from DNBOF and Gotfriends,but sim update 10 beta appears to have nullified them with regard to thermals,Ridge soaring is ok as long as I bump the wind speed up to 20 knots (knarly),the update has also grocked some keybindings e.g. The up cursor key no longer works and there are quite a few others…
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There certainly can be such omissions in a beta, it could be for good reason or merely and accident. Just remember those presets are 3rd party features and it wouldn’t be right if they interfered with Asobo’s own telemetry.
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Up till now they have proved to be good additions,yesterday afternoon With the heat most of us are experiencing I tried gliding without any presets and was encouraged to observe some thermal activity.Not enough to give huge altitude gains,but just enough to maintain my present height.Shame they didn’t allow thermals earlier,this heat could have been very interesting…
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Well,today (Wednesday august 17th) I thought I’d try live weather because the conditions are pretty unsettled and just like those gliding presets,produce very dense clouds.I used the AS33ME at EGHL and got to 2000 feet with the sustainer and then headed for the meanest looking cloud formation.It wasn’t too long before I found somewhat erratic but persistent lift.There was moisture streaming over the canopy and I was pretty much IMC most of the time,but did manage to get to 6,500 feet before I got bored and returned to the airfield.Shame we have to wait so long…
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Latest up & down draft talk from the Q&A (34:10)
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Sounds good, right ?! 
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Hey ANRI8496 that’s a good bit of analysis. I took the LS4 to Phoenix AZ and found something similar to what you describe:
I chose settings that seem to add up to ‘max’ thermals on your charts:
Starting with “Clear Sky” then set Bottom Layer cloud:
scatter: 50%
cover: 50%
density: 1
Cloud base: 8320 feet
Cloud top: 22220 feet (so 13,900 feet top-to-bottom)
Wind: 4 knots on ground (so was 8 knots at 10,000 feet)
Temperature: 21 Celcius
Under a SINGLE typical cloud I found multiple patches of lift (AMBIENT WIND Y):
300 to 450 feet per min
with multiple other areas of sink:
up to -100 feet per minute
So that is directionally similar to what you found, with the 500 fpm cap.
My macro observations are:
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Even though the cloud was ‘set’ as 8320…22220 feet, the actual visual appearance was only 10500 … 17400 feet. I’m sure we’ve all noticed this discrepancy between the settings and the rendered clouds before but this is the first time I measured it. It’s partly exacerbated by the fact the clouds are really quite translucent close up.
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With the cloud layer density set to “1” the ground was still visible until 13500 feet. Changing the density to “2” had the ground disappear at 12500 feet which is still 2000 feet above the apparent cloud base of 10500 feet (where I ‘set’ 8320 feet). In reality you’d lose sight of the ground within maybe 100…200 feet from cloudbase.
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Increasing the density from 1 to 2 didn’t change the lift, so your ‘max’ on the density chart seems reasonable.
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I did see higher lift values changing the temperature from 21 degrees C to 37 deg. C, i.e. I easily found lift at 500 fpm, so perhaps the ‘temperature’ curve maxes a bit higher than your ~20 deg.
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What jarred most with me compared to RL thermals is the way the MSFS lift is scattered in many small pockets under the cloud, with minor sink between the pockets. In RL the lift seems to collect together better (under the darkest bit of the cloud) so you can head towards that, feeling the lift on the way, and if you’ve got it right you can turn into a reliable decent thermal when the lift peaks. MSFS lift under clouds seems much more ‘bitty’ (i.e. fragmented) with the current implementation such that it mostly pays off to fly slowly through all of the lift and max out your height gain, as you’re not going to find a core anyway.
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With the current implementation MSFS is in not bad shape - increasing the ‘max’ for the lift will presumably be easy to do - the main snag there is if all the lift increases we’ll still have the granular lift fragmentation issue I see now but with stronger lift, so it will still pay off to fly slowly at cloudbase rather than search for the non-existent stronger core.
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Simupdate XI gonna be very interesting with the new big CFD simulation. That’s the one where a lot of things should change with the introduction of gliders.
But it’s 3 months away and probably gonna be delayed even further because of the current delay of Simupdate X…
Will they release 20KM CFD in SU XI? I thought that was only in prototype stage or something? If that is coming in su xi it will be an amazing update.
When they add that i really really hope METAR doesn’t interfare with that thing. Whats the point having that CFD if we can’t have it around airports? As soon as we coming in for landing CFD shifts into legacy fixed METAR winds. Really sad in my opinion. We have a simulated fluid outside of airports but not at the airports. Well, time will tell how they implement it.
It’s not announced for Simupdate XI, but they ‘‘hope’’ to get there this year (and there is only one simupdate left), so yeah I should be more careful with my assumption that they actually manage it 
Q&A statement:
So there’s a research work going on which basically took the CFD of the airplanes and expanded that 20ish kilometers around the plane, so that’s a really very very very big CFD running, and it goes pretty high as well.
And we hope that sometime this year we’ll get that to, basically manage to simulate those airflows in the atmosphere to get nicer updrafts, nicer wind, that can combine so that only bigger fields get updrafts when you are going higher up, that you get vortices with air going back down, and all sorts of different local wind effects that we don’t really get with live weather
Is this really the case with current ‘‘small’’ CFD? :
because from what I understand the big CFD will blend in with everything else, so there is no sudden switch or ending, it’s more like an local addition to the missing features of the current live weather.
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I really hope you are correct
Maybe it will be released with gliders in November update then? That will make the air to be as real as it gets i think. Just hope we can get as real as it gets unstable air too in thunderstorms for example without limits/unatural forces to make it easy.
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