In a flightsim i’ve learnt that it’s better to have to much than to less because we can’t feel them in the same way as in a aircraft IRL. We don’t want to have the planes to feel like they fly on a rail. It’s the same with racing sims, they need to have more squeeking sounds when turning to make us notice we have lost the grip of the road. I don’t think it’s to much turbulence though. Turbulence can be severe. It’s better to leave it as it is. Who decides if the turbulence is to much or to less. Everyone will have different opinions about it. They even told us they limmited the up&downdrafts of it beacuse we can’t understand why we would go up or down like a leaf. Thats not a good thing in sim to limit things. Winds can be strong and dangerous we need to understand that instead of limit things. We can’t limit things IRL if we think it’s to dangerous or to much. We can fly somewhere else though.
It will always be fake turbulence in a sim you know. The plane you fly in the sim is fake too should you turn off that too?
Have not flown over the Alps recently but your question suggests it may be time to repost the link for the PIREP reporting standards.
You question about “severe” turbulence being overdone indicates to me that you have not encountered sever turbulence in real life, even as a passenger. If you go to You Tube and search that very term, you will learn that SEVERE turbulence is not modelled at all in the sim.
Mountain wave turbulence over rocks the size of the Alps can be significant. Rarely would I expect to find severe but moderate would be fairly common.
I am afraid you misinterpreted my response. You indicated your interest in the subject. Based on your post I chose to offer some additional information that I thought, not only would you be interested in, but also would help clarify to you and others reading this thread, the proper definitions for turbulence.
It is unfortunate that you took it as a slight against you and not simply a sharing of additional knowledge.
Because simulators should be as realistic as possible i think it would be good to have some links in the sim to various elements or guides of some sort to make us learn about things when we use the sim. I remember back in the days when i got fs 2002 we got an instruction book with it and that showed many things about aviation. That was my first flight sim and had no experience about flight before. I read it and find it very interesting to learn. I think now in modern times they could just have some links on various things in the sim and then a wiki-page or some videos comes up to describe it for us. I know that has nothing to do with the turbulence. I just think we should learn before we decides to complain about things we don’t know anything about. I have no experience of severe turbulence before and i learned that they can be very severe and thats why we should try to avoid those turbulences IRL. In a sim we don’t need to avoid them because we feel no risk to fly in them. We can just restart if something bad happens and we will not have any passengers complaining about a rough travel. Instead of removing or limit things they should make us avoid those turbulences by integrate meteoblue or something that tells us like expect severe turbulence on this route with a link that describes the turbulence for us. That will make us plan ahead and learn.
They have clear air turbulences predicted here not integratet in the sim though what i know of.
Although I agree that it would be nice to have some sort of contextual help in the sim, the truth is that in the early days of FS software the ability to access educational material via the net was pretty tedious. Most of us were still using dial-up modems and ADSL was quite expensive and still painfully slow by today’s standards. Today it takes seconds to find everything from study material to You Tube videos on most subjects.
It would be nice if there was some “Official” sources that new users could turn to as the amount of misinformation continuously exceeds the useful. As you try to learn some of the concepts, I strongly recommend using real world study sources first. This will allow you to weed out all the videos flooding YT that are of questionable accuracy.
Yes, the nostalgic sound of the dial-up modem 
You are totally right about “official” sources that is the best sources to learn from. I just gave some “bad” examples of how it could be done. 
This is some information about turbulence. There you can see some prucedures you could do when experience turbulence in the sim to make it realistic when flying.
(Here you can even read about the severe of the turbulence in the alps)
It’s fake because it has no resemblance to actual. Flying a light plane like the VL3 through canyons between mountains results in extreme 30+ degree excursions in yaw that are implemented on a regular schedule you can set with a watch. In between these timed blasts in yaw, it’s perfectly smooth. It don’'t work that way. Fake.
Yes, maybe they are not the most realistic but they will always be fake even if they put all the time they have on this specific thing. They can’t put in real turbulence in a sim. Everything in a sim is fake/simulated. They can have an off switch for it but that will also be unrealistic to not have any kind of turbulence. Then it would be like driving a car in the air. I think they should focus on improving the simulation of air movement instead of limit or disable things.
Give some feedback how you want them implemented if you want them better instead or send a zendesk ticket and describe how to make them more realistic or a wishlist topic about it. I could have done that but i’m not exactly sure what to improve on it. I think there is many things missing in the simulation of air movement that makes the flight very predicted. Like the friction of objects and such things on the ground that should cause the horizontally movement of air to slow down. As it is now we only have those vertically changes of air to go up&down. Gusts that are created by those frictions making the sim more unpredicted.
It’s also thermals that needs to be implemented and the turbulence around clouds need improvement. It’s many things that needs improvements.
I don’t want them to be dissabled though. If you want to disable them set the wind to 0kts in custom weather. There you have options. Then you can fly and see the canyons without disturbances of turbulence.
Not true. All the weather stuff is off. This exaggerated yaw turbulence is relatively new. A little bit of random bumping around would be ok. Just not what’s going on now and there’s no need to defend it.
Not picking on you Perry. I have seen this comment numerous times in many posts and just figured it was time to set the record straight.
Clouds do not cause turbulence. Clouds are simply the result of the air’s inability to hold the moisture in solution. This can be for any of a number of reasons or a combination of them. There are many different forms of cloud and only a very few of those will be present due to turbulent air.
There is a lot of information available on the web about cloud formation and atmospherics so I won’t try to write a text book here. Suffice to say that it is expected to find turbulence anywhere there is unstable air or air moving over uneven surfaces; or even two air masses interacting with each other.
Air is just a fluid. We have all seen rivers, streams, lakes and waterfalls. It doesn’t take much imagination to understand water flowing over rocks causing a turbulent flow. Observing the river we can see how the friction of a smooth bottom slows the water at the bottom and causes upwellings even in a smooth river. If that was air, those gentle upwellings would contain moisture and as they rise, usually, the pressure and temperature drops, reducing the amount of moisture the air can hold. That released moisture condenses and, poof, you have a cloud.
Even in a lake with a glass smooth surface, water is rising and falling within the column and air is no different. Just the fact that there is a plowed field among fields of grass can be enough on a calm day to generate big puffy clouds. The likelihood that you would encounter any significant turbulence in that case is slim.
The extreme up/down drafts encountered around thunderstorms is an indication of the tremendous temperature and pressure differences within the storm cell. It is the rapidly moving air within the cell that generates the turbulence. The cloud associated is also a result of the air movement. It is just the white water foam and spray. It is the result of the turbulence. not the cause.
Some of the worst turbulence I have encountered IRL was on days with nary a cloud in the sky. I have played among the clouds, cloud busting we called it, on days so calm you could have applied eye liner as we tore through the cotton.
I will be the first to admit that the atmospheric model needs a lot of work. The danger is when users become fixated on misunderstood aspects of those atmospherics that we end up with threads like the early ones that resulted in the turbulence model being dialed way back in the first place. I would hate to have another series of threads that demanded increased turbulence around clouds, when in fact clouds are not directly related to measurable turbulence. They are but a byproduct of the factors that can cause turbulence.
Thats totally fine to pick on me You describing it very good
I seen those topics too and thought that was right. It’s as you say we need to know things from official sources before we can sort the right things out. I’m sorry to missleading you with bad information. Are those High and Low pressure systems simulated in the sim? I don’t think so. I think they should be but maybe very hard to simulate. I hope they can prove me wrong. Actually the High and Low pressure makes the wind move to begin with. I though the clouds actually causing friction but now when you describing it it makes sense. If the clouds could cause those turbulences we should not be able to fly through them. The clouds would be like a wall and they are not.
I hope they will improve on how all of this functions in the sim though not limit or take anything away from it if they not have something better to replace it with.
You should make a topic about that atmospheric improvement in the wishlist, i would vote for that for sure.
Pressure changes are modelled. The fact that your altimeter shows an increase in altitude as you climb is proof of that. You may also notice that as you fly from one location to another the altimeter setting changes.
The weather system is unfortunately not a global model that would simulate an airmass moving along the surface of the earth. Meteo Blu’s weather simulation software is modelling all that but we are provided with “cubes” of weather that is calculated by their simulations and the parameters for what is to be represented in the cube is transmitted to your computer based on what cube you are in.
This means we are not really experiencing a true recreation of the movement of the interacting airmasses. We are just seeing a snapshot of what the simulations think would be in our area.
Thank you so much!
Maybe we are way out of topic now though but in a way i think all of those things is in common because it’s the air/wind model in someway all of it. I think they need to get all of it right to make it all feel right together.
I have flown many many years as cabin crew on 737 and 320’s. Believe it or not, but it is very shaky, and can be extremely shaky over mountains, even at 36000ft !! …according to the weather of course.
I’ve seen the food carts hit the ceiling. Not fun.
I had like an addon for fsx that was called active sky. That addon had many sliders to choose many different settings. One example was how strong the turbulence should be at most. Something like that i think should be good instead of have only on/off. They should always keep the unlimmited setting though.
The more customization for the wind & weather the better because someone will always complain about it to be unrealistic because it never going to be real.
The atmospheric, air and flight model will always be the most important feature in a flightsim, i realy hope they focus the most on that aspect of the sim. That all of us who using this flightsim has benefit of. Graphics improvements only those who have hardware for it has the benefit from it and it will also bring new bugs with it as we could see with su5 and start more complains about graphics things.
I know terrain turbulences are present in MSFS like in real life, and thats good, but terrain turbulences in MSFS are totaly overdosed. Planes still bouncing around by up and downdrafts like pinballs, no matter where on this earth and no matter which altitude, speed or wind. I can not remember in my short career as a real life GA and paragliderpilot got some experience with horrible up and downdrafts under normal conditions, like in MSFS. Hope this will be solved soon, like many other (live)weatherbugs.
Max
I feel it’s gotten worse after SU11? The wind speed changes waay to violently and at high frequencies with very short peaks that don’t feel like gusts at all and they surely don’t feel like the usual clear air turbulence