It’s NOT happening in North America, I assure you. Any time there’s a storm, I intentionally fly in the area and I never see it anymore.
Agreed. Removing lightning from “live weather” isn’t the right answer. It didn’t need to happen every 5 seconds, but they should have it at least during thunderstorms.
Interest point about when they moved to METAR. I bet $10 t this is the reason we aren’t seeing lightning in life weather anymore.
A cool way to test this might be to fly out over the ocean where there are known thunderstorms. You should only be getting model based weather there and not METAR weather.
Heat lightning is just regular thunderstorm lightning. It’s kind of a misnomer for what folks usually mean as distant lightning. It would be cool if the sim actually had “heat lightning” though, in that it drew flashes from faraway storms. I’ve only ever seen it spit out lightning that was within a few miles.
Lightning was not properly implemented when it was released. Tiny translucent puffball clouds were cranking out huge bolts. I think the fix for this was a lot harder than just tweaking the lightning parameter, or dialing the lightning back a bit, and perhaps they’ve disabled it as result. And I totally agree with that. They shouldn’t be releasing stuff half baked.
Another possibility is that they’ve simply broken the lightning as they’ve been changing the weather system and haven’t gotten around to fixing it yet. I suspect this is what happened to wind gusts in Live Weather and convective turbulence, which the sim used to have but seems to be entirely absent now.
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Hmm, I’ve seen lightning directly over my head arcing through the clouds on hot summer nights when there is no rain to be seen anywhere… ?
I’ll admit there was no thunder either, which is probably not possible, but, it sure looked like it was overhead. The clouds were really high, as well, but puffy, and the sky overcast…
There’s always a big Cb somewhere producing it. They’re usually airmass storms that are tens of miles away. Sometimes the flashes light up closer clouds, or the storm looks a lot closer than it is. Rarely the lightning channel will branch out for miles horizontally away from the Cb into clear air. You’d definitely hear the thunder from that if it were overhead though.
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Because having constant lightning arcing between small, wispy clouds like they were connected to a massive Van de Graaff generator is just ridiculously distracting.
I wonder if it’s possible that this high horizontal lightning is in such thin air that the thunder doesn’t propagate downward…
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I think this is already tracked in Where are the thunder and lightning...?
I’m always flying with live weather but I haven’t seen lightning in several months, even if I’m mainly flying at night where it’s easier to spot such weather phenomena. To the point I can’t even remember what lightning looks like in the game.
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I have not seen any; even since update. 12!
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I saw that once IRL. There was a sheet of high level overcast. Puffy clouds like bubble wrap. Every 5-10 seconds there was a lightning flash from above it, but absolutely no thunder. I watched for what must have been at least 5 minutes, maybe more. It was probably 2AM, or so, so pitch black, except when the lightning lit up the clouds from above, showing that bubble wrap structure to them.
It was like something out of Close Encounters, it was so eerie.
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That was about a year ago, they fixed it and you’ll be lucky to have found a live thunderstorm since. I’ve not and I’ve tested loads of locations where storms were actually occurring.
It’s such a shame that such a fundamental element of flying is not very high on the Asobo/MS fix list. Surely they can see how rubbish it is?
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