Yes. they talk about it because I added in Dev Q&A forum section question about if here https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/can-you-explain-what-factors-are-currently-taken-into-account-in-thermal-updraft-model-and-what-are-the-future-plans-for-realistic-soaring-weather/517667 (It is still worth reading as I made there some suggestions.) - sadly they have some policy about not advertising questions so I didn’t post abut it here when it was active, thankfully it got enough upvotes.
I am thinking about preparing another “loaded” question about the scope of features they plan to add with official gliders support.
User “GurtTractor” at Discord did a transcript of their response:
`In SU9 it computes the amount of watts, the energy recieved by the sun, which will depend on if it’s day or night, how high the sun is in the sky, how thick of atmosphere is crossed by the sunlight, if it’s humid or whatever if there’s haze etc, if there’s clouds. And so at the end there’s an amount of watts remaining that hits the ground at a certain angle, and then you know how much energy you get, then it calculates all sorts of things like how dark, albedo basically, how much energy is reflected, how much is kept. This transforms into heat, and then you know how much basically your ground is heating up. When you ground is significantly warmer than the air it builds up hot air which then wants to go up, and here you have your thermals.
Right now this is SU9, what we are adding with SU10 is to make this a little bit more comfortable, we are blending in the wind factor so that when you have absolutely zero wind you will get less thermals. … So now when you have low wind speeds the thermals are going to be much less than before, if you want strong thermals put at least 5 knots of wind or something … We also made these turbulence a little bit weaker at high altitudes, like I would say 20k and above, you will see less thermals. In SU10 you will see more gusts however.`
`And something we are currently working on but that will not be for SU10 - the problem with this system is that is it’s really working very locally, and generates local thermals that don’t combine when the go up and create, like the air which goes up somewhere else it needs to go back down, it doesn’t create any vortices/turblences on the side of thermals, anything like that yet. 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, like live weather gives us wind gusts and direction but it’s something a bit more for the area, and not really (Seb interrupted by someone in his building, also briefly mentions looking into thermal effects over snow).`