Per what’s described by ATIS, they also set the wind pressure to be the Gusting speed as the base speed, not the base speed. It does not seem to have a proper understanding of gusting. So, at least around me, the wind speed is usually double what it should be.
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Looks like the old CDN issue. My guess is that for each forecast hour fx(x in 0 to 12), they push the current fx from the same forecast run to the broadcast server to replace fx -1. If successful, when user requests to download the current live weather, the closest forecast to the current hour would be downloaded. Sounds like for some servers, the new one fails to push the old one out, resulting in static f0 forecast until it’s replaced by the next f0 (probably through a different mechanism)
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I’m quite certain that Asobo is not hosting any part of the live weather at their facility. When live weather is activated, the flightsimulator.exe processes establishes 3 additional TCP/IP connections. Two of them connect to IP addresses owned by Microsoft Azure. One downloads a lot of data initially, then stops. The other shows a continual incoming stream that slows after an initial burst, (when the aircraft is stationary), and picks up again after the aircraft starts moving. I suspect that the first server is streaming the weather graphics contained in the world map, and the second is streaming the actual forecast model data used in-game.
The third IP address is hosted on Amazon AWS, and I think that is streaming the current METAR data. When they were having METAR time sync issues in early December, Seb mentioned in a Q&A that it was caused by a problem at a “contractor’s” end, which had been fixed. I don’t think that the METAR data is being provided by MeteoBlue - I think they contracted with another data provider when they made the decision to start using a partial METAR injection for surface weather.
Of course, METAR data can be obtained from multiple sources, including the NOAA, but I doubt that Microsoft would want to use a government data source directly.
When spawning at an airport with Live Weather active, I always check the temperature, pressure and wind with the current NOAA METAR for that airport, and probably 98 times out of 100 they will correspond perfectly.
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How are you checking the weather from the game, listening to ATIS, or do you have a tool which shows actual measures of wind speed and direction and temperature?
As I noted, 100% of the time, the wind speed from ATIS is the gusting speed.
Maybe this is a result of their not having functionality to say 32015G24? ATIS in that case will always say 320 @ 24. The windsock is usually extended at that 24, so I’ve been assuming the wind speed is what they are saying the wind speed is in the game.
Temperature and pressure can be seen directly in any of the G1000 equipped aircraft. I simply press the B key on the keyboard to sync the aircraft altimeter baro setting to the current external pressure. The default G1000 aircraft can also show wind direction and speed. The Working Title G1000 mod suppresses the display of wind on the ground, since the real G1000 can only calculate wind when the aircraft is in flight.
But, in my case I use a 3rd party developer tool that can directly monitor the simconnect atmospheric environment variables for ambient pressure, total and static air temperature, air density, wind direction, wind velocity, and pressure altitude. There is not (and never has been) a simconnect variable for dewpoint. Dewpoint is not something which any MS simulator (FSX, P3D or MSFS) is able to use directly, so the “dewpoint” reading in the ATIS is meaningless.
The METAR wind direction and speed is being injected into the sim environment exactly as reported. Now, the sim may be applying a gust factor to that value that changes the aerodynamic effect on the flight model. The tool I use will not show that.
The ATIS report of temperature and pressure appear to correspond to what is being injected. A gust factor may be applied to injected winds. ATIS reports of clouds, precipitation and dewpoint appear to be completely fictitious. They have nothing to do with the actual weather in the sim environment, with the possible exception of the very lowest cloud layer when conditions are overcast.
The simconnect variable for “visibility” is being set when live weather is active, and this appears to come from MeteoBlue, not the METAR. But, the sim (currently) appears to try to translate that to “particle density” rather than being able to use visibility directly in standard aviation units of miles/km or yards/meters. I have seen true low surface visibility in the sim on several occasions, but it appears to do that by simply placing a cloud layer on the surface.
As an aside I have been concerned about pressure settings and have compared these with METARS at my departure and arrival airports. On my last flight these matched but there were some crazy changes settings as I was handed over from one Centre to another. Washington Centre had several different settings. I hope to fly later and continue my experiments.
I was banging about the same for some time so thank you for putting it here. What is more, the meteoblue models work based on fronts and not metars, so its the first time in a sim that you can fly around a front, this was impossible with a metar depiction saying scattered clouds and just randomnly drawing clouds in an area which was totally unrealistic, furthermore, outside the metar areas just were interpolations not realistic at all but for simmers used to be the norm.
Metars are just aproximations but flight sims used it to precisely depict the weather, wind 10k from 90degrees was exactly what you found in your approach, nothing closer from what I find when I fly in real life and get a metar that may been there for the last 40 minutes as if weather was static. Any real pilot during planning will look for the fronts and wind maps rather than simple querying metars… real conditions are usually broadcasted by towers, information centers or just the airfield radio on your request.
I think at the macro level as you explained the weather system works really well and it will be very difficult for a 3rd party to bring that info to the sim unless you get licenced info from weatherchannel and the likes and unless the devs come with a different model they will bring the old metar/interpolation models to MSFS which from my point of view is totally dated.
Asobo needs to work on the micro level, wind depiction and some other mismatches from the “live” perspective (including ATIS), dew points and visibility and pressure variations and they acknowledged that, I hope with future releases this will be improved.
As for planning, I starting to relay more in the meteoblue website in my flight planning to compensate the old metar approaches.
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This is what I was looking for
So, I think what they are doing is stripping the first three characters and the last two, as opposed to the stripping the first three characters and the next two. Every time I compare ATIS to real, it always reports the wind to be the Gust value of a metar wind report for the airfield. Just as for dewpoint, I don’t think FS directily deals with gust factor from metar. So, personally, I think it’s just a logic mistake made by someone who doesn’t have an understanding of aviation weather.
Yes I agree with you. I am not saying that it is working properly far from it. Maybe I wasn’t clear in my post, I thought it would have been from the preceding posts.
My worry was that with so many posts complaining about the live weather not working at all, i.e people getting clear skies and standard pressure and temps, especially when doing a second flight after returning to the main menu, Asobo would think that the live weather was fixed if this didn’t occur and people we always able to get the live weather working. I think there have been far more complaints about that than our issue which is having a way of predicting the sim weather for flight planning purposes.
Sure sure, I was just reposting the published info on how Meteoblue’s forecasts are updated. Flight Simulator should match, or it’s a bug on the Flight Simulator end, (or they’ve intentionally gimped the update cycle to save on bandwidth or something).
So it would be important to ask them to be specific on what forecast data is going on Microsoft’s Azure servers, and if it’s the most currently available data from Meteoblue and their METAR source. Otherwise they might just rattle off the same info about how Meteoblue updates twice a day, and the METARs once an hour. Well, they’d probably just be deer in headlights on the QA session if asked that, unless they had time to actually check.
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In saying “predicting” flight sim weather; I assume you mean that we need a method of knowing what the weather is along our chosen flight path? Like, you’d create a flight plan, and you could get a report similar to Leidos, as well as a general weather map facility to see what the weather is doing in an area?
That’s what I’d want. I’m interested in knowing what Asobo’s plans are. I assume that’s why they aren’t interested in 3rd party weather injectors… 1. it would greatly complicate what they have to do behind the scenes to accomodate it, 2. They have plans for expanding it and making it a central part of the sim as a feature and 3. Putting it in FS would be a pretty good sales tool for selling other products that would use these facilities they are developing across many industries. That has always been the purpose of Flight Sim, not to create the game (though I’m sure that was one reason for the sake of Paul Allen), but as a tool to demonstrate technologies for the big contracts we don’t normally see going on behind the scenes.
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As an aside, has anyone sat and watched the flight sim world map and watched the weather systems moving? Is it just in a loop cycle? What is the real-time timeframe for this? By how much is it accelerated on the map?
Yes exactly this, there are many ways that this can be achieved.
At the moment with the resources and programs available, I want to be able to say, right, today I am flying from London to Paris at 1600z for example, I am in a C172, it is cold and I am going VFR so I need to avoid clouds. I want to be able to go to the Meteoblue weather map on their site and look at the maps for low cloud and cloud base and check the conditions along the route at the time I will be flying in order to see if this is possible, or whether I should delay if the weather is likely to clear up, or whether I can take a slightly different route, or whether to be defeated and come back another day. I want the weather I see for the forecast for 1600z to be the weather that is in the sim at 1600z when I begin to fly.
At the moment I can look at the meteoblue forecasts, but this seems to be hardly every what is actually depicted in the sim. Sometimes it is correct, sometimes it is incorrect but I can work out that the weather in the sim is actually coming from a forecast for 12z (as an example), but most of the time it is impossible to work out and so I cannot do any flight planning. Sometimes it is just totally wrong, today in my research I found an airport that according to Meteoblue’s forecast as shown on their maps, using NEMS Global as the source, had greater than 95% low cloud coverage all day, absolutely all day, and a cloud base of 50-100m all day, absolutely all day, including in the past for as long as I could go back into the forecasts. So I load into it in the sim, clouds are broken at 5000ft… So what is happening here? How is the sim depicting this?
Now I consider live weather to be broken until I can achieve the above.
I am not particularly keen on a METAR based approach, as I find it breaks immersion as the local METAR is applied globally, with a sudden change to new weather as soon as you enter a METAR area. Nor am I overly concerned if the Meteoblue forecasts do not 100% match what actually happened/will happen in real life. It is a forecast and they often aren’t 100% accurate.
I am worried that there have been lots of reports of people not being able to get any ‘live weather’ i.e clear skies, standard pressure, 15 and degrees MSL (I think!) etc, however in my experience this only happens of you start second flight from the main menu. Yes this is a problem and needs to be sorted, but my concern is that when this is fixed (I hope it is, though I am not in anyway desperate for it, as if I do a second flight I normally continue from where I am rather than zooming across the world, and if I need to i can just restart my sim) the developers will think that the issues and bugs and main complaint with live weather is fixed. I certainly would consider it to be so, as I have outlined my principal concern above, which is to do with the flight planning aspect and accuracy of the depiction of Meteoblue’s forecasts in the sim (not necessarily the accuracy of the forecasts themselves).
Sorry for the long post, I didn’t intend it to be but I just got carried away typing, one of the many downsides of being a lawyer…
Anyway I hope this has clarified my position, and I am more than happy to help undertake any research into this area!
Weather is an extremely important part of aviation. There are several issues and problems that need resolution.
MSFS ATIS non-live weather - I rarely use Live Weather relying on the various presets for the environment I want to fly. I always assumed that an airport’s ATIS matches the preset. However, it isn’t close. This needs to be fixed.
MSFS ATIS Live Weather. - This is broken as well. MSFS ATIS needs to match the real ATIS. There is no reason why it shouldn’t.
METEOBLIE - This is awesome technology. If I wanted to build a simulation of the weather around the world, I would use this as a source. It has a lot of good information even for pilots. Does METEOBLUE feed aviation weather information to MSFS? Don’t know.
MSFS missing features - Pilots flying IFR or Commercial need accurate timely AVIATION weather not only for the departure airport but the arrival and alternate airports. This information is not available currently in MSFS. Pilots don’t have the time to take weather information from METEOBLUE or other commercial sources and distill it into the weather information for their flight. The best example of the aviation weather info needed in MSFS is the weather in SimBrief flight reports. Also, SimBrief METAR and TAF matches the IRL airport weather info. MSFS needs to have accurate aviation weather including an accurate ATIS.
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If Meteoblue are selling their ‘real-time’ data to commercial clients I could understand why they might intentionally delay it or reduce the refresh rate of the data they offer for free to MSFS.
Do you have an evidence? And who said they provide that for free 
Microsoft is a commercial client. I have no doubt that they are paying MeteoBlue for their service. Their global NEMS model is available twice each day, as soon as the calculations are complete, typically around 0530 and 1730 UTC. Their model output is probably encoded in GRIB format, which is the standard file format used for computer weather model output, no matter what the source.
Meteorological forecasting services like MeteoBlue pride themselves on providing their data “on time” to their clients, which include agricultural and energy sector users for whom timely updates are very important. I can’t imagine them deliberately delaying it for any reason.
Microsoft probably has to further process the model file to convert the data into a form the sim can use, and then load it into their Azure servers for streaming to the game. If there is any delay, it is probably happening at the Azure end.
It is possible that MeteoBlue pushes the completed forecast file to Microsoft when it is ready, but probably more likely that Microsoft initiates the download.
I think live weather is improving quite a lot.
Meteoblue website is now displaying METAR and TAF data. For example: Current weather Liverpool Airport - meteoblue
They didn’t show all that in the past. I know because I browse that site almost every day and before each flight for MSFS flight planning.
Earlier in the morning I spawned at EGGP with live weather and the in-sim weather matched letter by letter, word by word, with the then METAR published in their site.
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I tend to like flying towards interesting weather. Sadly Live Weather works about 1 out of 10 times for me. The “Clear Skies” workaround doesn’t work. I flew north out of Lubbock yesterday evening to see what MSFS made of the chain of supercell storms that had been forecast for days. Clear skies. It’s becoming a big disappointment.
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