It’s easy to find in Live Weather. Click around on the World Map setting random departure points until the Live Weather icon shows thunderstorms:
It’s common in the tropics because of the weather parameters they’re using to control lightning (relative humidity is a part of it probably hence the tropics). Northern South America and Florida are good places to check.
If you turn on Developer Mode->Debug Weather, it’s easy to see if there’s lightning there or not. The “Ambient Lightning” variable will have a value greater than zero:
You can just slew around until the value changes.
Unfortunately the underlying issues remain. Mainly that there are no CBs in this scene, and yet we have lots of lightning, which is extremely unnatural:
This behavior has been unchanged for months (years?) since they made Live Weather lightning much less common. But it’s always been there. I think folks are just happening upon lightning by chance or noticing it more as the Northern Hemisphere warms up.
I hope this is addressed in FS24, but I’m not holding my breath. And this is also why I hope tornadoes are confined to missions only. Random tornadoes at inappropriate times could ruin the gameplay.
South Florida is great place to fly right now if you want to see CBs and lightning in Live Weather:
There’s really lightning there right now:
And the sim has it too:
And the convection is thousands of feet deep with rain, not just tiny puff balls:
The lightning parameter got as high as 45% here, which is the highest I’ve seen it. I made an observation here though that I think is making the clear air lightning issue much more apparent. The lightning MUST come out of a cloud. So if there are only a few clouds in the scene, like in the first example here, then you see all these clear air lightning bolts emanating out of the same tiny puffballs. It looks super unnatural. But when there actually is deep convection, like in the second Florida example here, even though the lightning probabilities are much higher, the lightning is spread out among a lot more clouds and also obscured by the rain and clouds, so it’s actually harder to see the bolts.
