They certainly have lots of data, but I do not know how the agreement works as far as application and integration in a way that’s relevant for realistic flying. Suffice it to say, wherever the limitation is, the results are fairly glaring, but different people notice different things about it. Whereas one might notice the lack of rendering and transition, another might notice the lack of geospatial accuracy. And neither of those people are incorrect. The difficulty becomes how to move past it - the tradeoff for one might not be worth the other, but in actuality, both are needed. Is it both possible and economical to do it right? Thats the real question and we don’t know enough about what’s going on under the hood to really input how to fix it other than to make observations that “something is wrong here.”
Realistic weather behavior for me is when the weather has realistic physics. And for you it means when it’s accurate.
I think you misunderstand what I’m saying: If it’s not accurate, it’s not realistic physics. If it were realistic physics, it would be accurate. The claim that it ever had realistic physics can be easily dismissed. It was a facade that had folks thinking it did.
But again it comes back to granularity and processing power and I highly doubt the engine has enough power to do it right without an immense uptick in price. So we have to accept tradeoffs until someone figures out how to do it. One such tradeoff is using observations to inject the changes that have occurred in between larger modeling. Sometimes it’s okay and sometimes it’s super kludgy.
I go over aviation weather in great detail every stream I host. I pointed it out last week with a squall line over Louisville and went into depth why the sim being so off is detrimental to “realistic” flying. As I flew through it, I pointed out the spatiotemporal discrepancies. So if we want to talk about accuracy, physics, and what that means to real pilots and sim pilots alike, I’m all about it.
Well i must agree. But as long as forecast providers needs to update the initial conditions of weather in their calculations of weather we will never get both at the same time.
I am not blaming it on METAR. Others in this thread were incorrectly blaming the loss of lightning as it was a simplification made for XBox users. And that is incorrect. It had nothing to do with XBox. It was a result of the #1 bug that people requested weather match the METAR. SU5 and SU6 had lightning in it. I know. I experienced it before when I was on XBox. Lightning disappeared from the sim, for me at least, with the introduction of SU7, which was aimed at resolving the #1 bug at the time. It was an unintended bug from addressing the request for weather to match METAR.
Fair enough, but is METAR really quashing the lightning? There is a lot of weather depiction outside of METAR areas, even some severe storms are currently depicted (about 45 minutes behind reality) as towering clouds in a fairly developed line (so not injected by METAR). But no lightning in them.
I’m just trying to separate out the guesswork here in an attempt to educate myself and hopefully others, but I’m not quite able to come to the same conclusions as others based on some very finite observations I’ve made.
No. METAR is not quashing lightning. I stated it was a BUG from the implementation. I cannot see in any reasonable way where this was an intended coding. If you got the impression that I was stating that, then I apologize for my miscommunication. That was not the intended meaning. This was a bug that was introduced by making weather related changes in SU7. It had nothing to do with making things more causal for XBox users.
Okay, I gotcha. Somewhere in all the changes, lightning got squashed. Fair. Prior to that, we’d see lightning everywhere, even where there were no clouds, so we went from one extreme to the other.
I have to run to a event, but I just made a bunch of observations involving current severe weather in Oklahoma and Texas and how it’s off by 40 miles or so. The sim still has one airport “shut down” behind the storm that has since cleared irl, and another (in front of the storm) that is under the gun irl where the storms are still about 30-40 mins away in the sim. Several others with severe storms 10 miles north and the sim is showing nothing. Then there’s Cheyenne, WY, currently surrounded by pop up cells, sim shows a few puffy clouds.
I’ve got several dozen screenshots comparing between real-world observations and in-sim depictions that I may post later if I get time. Or I might just include it in a stream in a few days. Anyway, that’s the kind of effect I’m trying to help mitigate. If we can demonstrate how it’s negatively affected and why it’s important, maybe it’ll go farther toward improving it.
I am currently parked at MKJP in-sim and there is a thunderstorm going on with 3rd party apps but not in default MSFS live weather.
CB clouds are 100% absent from the sim unless definded by preset. The only thing that -sometimes- happens is lightning and thunder added to existing clouds.
AFAIK Asobo refused to comment on that ever since MSFS was released. And yes, I would call absence/faulty depiction of a common weather phenomenon a bug since it doesnt fulfill what Asobo was promising on release.
Technical impossibility cant be the reason for that, since MSFS can visually produce a thunderstrom cell and it flawlessly produces local rain cells too.
My guess is they need something to advertise FS2024 with…
it used to work just fine in live weather in the past, that was before SU4-5 sometime around that afaik.
i can’t tell it’s been ages
they removed it after they messed around with weather cuz of vatsimmers complaints and then we had thunderstrikes in clear weather and severe icing.
they just decided to fully remove lightning storms instead of trying to bring it back properly.
Not true. I found some yesterday north of Abilene. They were tall enough, but not nearly wide enough as the actual line, and missing several surrounding cells. Also off by 30-40 minutes. But there were definitely two large CBs in live weather. Didn’t see any lightning.
We had lightning strikes in clear weather or from small clouds all the way back to the first versions of the sim.
The thunderstrikes in clear weather I had way past SU5 and it had to be fixed later afaik. I know nothing about coding but shouldnt it be possible to just tie lightning and thunder effects to CB cells and you are good to go?
Also, I didnt get the whole “Meteosat vs. Metar” stuff. There shouldnt be any severe contradictions between the two so it should be possible to combine/mix the data. Thats a lot of fine tuning work but the devs had 3 years for it.
Now with FS2024 i am worried they will drop features after release as well, then what?
METAR doesn’t work for Thunderstorms either, I’ve been at airports with active TS in real life, reported correctly in METAR on my Xbox X……Start flight and nothing happening, no lightning in the distance.
That’s the killer of immersion to me.
Here on the South Carolina coast with flat terrain and ocean we see thunderheads 60+ miles away, come nightfall lighting can be seen in those storm cells. Flights in real life you can see storms in the distance. All of this has been missing from MSFS2020 sadly. Too bad cause as someone else mentioned, the rain modeling is good. They never got thunderstorms working realistically in 4 years+
I’ve coded gaming graphics and for meteorologists as part of my job, so I can tell you it is indeed possible. But apparently the sim wasn’t setup to do this. The clouds and lightning are coming from disparate sources it seems, and there might even be technical challenges in getting the sim to know when to draw CBs or if it even has drawn sufficiently large CBs. Lightning is apparently on or off depending on some atmospheric ingredients. And meanwhile the clouds are just randomly generated based on other parameters.
It’s a bigger project than just checking a couple variables and throwing a switch, and that’s probably why this is still on the backburner after years.
In an ideal world. In reality this is like comparing the morning forecast from your local weatherman to what you’re actually looking at on a thermometer later that afternoon. It may be off, and quite a bit sometimes, but your particular thermometer was not even really what the weatherman was talking about. Mixing these two data sources is actually like jamming a square peg in a round hole, they’re that different.
It’s because weather is hard to predict. Something in the atmosphere has caused the weather to completely change the outcome of the weather that were predicted (butterfly effect). If the weather in the sim is unpredictable it would actually be realistic. But for some reason weather in a flightsimulator needs to be 100% predictable to be 100% realistic, thats why the complains weather in the sim is not 100% accurate. We actually wants weather to be non chaotic in flight simulators to be able to plan our flights.
Weather is a chaotic thing and means it’s equally chaos to create a perfect weather system in a flight simulator it feels like. Thats because nobody has 100% detailed & accurate data of weather that are observed and reported in real-time globally and locally over the whole world at the same time. Either we have a bit more detailed forecasts of the future or less detailed observations of the past.
This is not true at all and we really need to clarify or dispel with this notion to make any progress.
Weather is fairly predictable, but it takes on different phases and different scales. On one hand, you can have favorable thermodynamic and kinematic conditions for certain kinds of weather, but you need something to initiate the weather. This can take several forms - frontal boundaries, surface convergence (such as outflows), surface heating (insolation), orographic lift, etc. The problem with forecasting is you can get all the conditions in place, but it does something else and causes, like you said, a chaos effect.
However, the word chaos does not mean it’s that unpredictable. For instance, you can use surface observations when a dry line is moving into a warm sector and surface heating is reaching a point where the combination of airmass boundary and insolation will produce enough lift to erode a capping inversion. You just don’t know which cell is going to become dominant until it does. But once it does, you can fairly easily predict what it’s going to do in the short term and how it might affect the rest of the surrounding and downstream airmass.
That’s why it’s important enough we can’t ignore it as pilots - that storm over there is going to affect me over here, eventually. This area of clear weather is primed for explosive development of thunderstorms in the next hour, etc. So having it do random stuff is just not going to fly, at all. But the sim doesn’t do storm and mesoscale granularity well, for reasons that probably have to do with computing power and cost. It doesn’t do cloud (or air parcel) movement in multiple layers, which eschews a large part of how weather works. You can’t possibly say it behaves or behaved realistically, ever, if doesn’t and can’t do that.
Thus, what we get is fairly delayed and deterministic. But it does replicate how the weather behaved, and that is close enough to realism to make it work. It’s the least they can do without a ton more power.
