Why can’t we know anything from both the developers and moderators? 
there is so much evidencesin this thread but not a word of acknowledgement…
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It may just be that they have their hands full getting SU10 production ready. Let’s get that out the way, then they may have time to look at other things more closely.
Actually i thought su10 should have fixed those issues with weather. We have waited since su7 to get those switches/hard transitions fixed. Well, need to wait for su11 to maybe get it fixed.
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It would be incredible if we could just get this back permanently.
I wouldn’t mind if we just had the option to either switch METAR insertions on or off ourselves, just to get this. That way everyone could be happy - those who need METARs for VATSIM can have it on, those who don’t can switch it off.
Out of interest, if the good clouds disappear at 0700 Z, what time to they get switched on? Could anyone in other parts so the world during the night UK time (West Coast USA?) say whether they consistently appear at a certain time as well. I couldn’t see any answers here. Apologies if I missed them.
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And while they’re at it, could they lose that ■■■■ summer snow cover when its 25C?
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I see this too in SU9.
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We know that the switch between good and bad weather happens at 07:04 zulu time. But does someone know at what time the switch between bad and good weather happens ?
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Just wondering if there has been anything further on this do you know Hester?
Thanks
Andy
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Thanks for the update, I don’t envy the person taking on that task! Hopefully it can be investigated then once SU10 is released. I’ve been looking through some of my pre-SU7 screenshots and it is so sad to see how the clouds used to look, compared to what we have now.
Thanks for chasing this up!
Andy
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First and foremost: a big thankyou to @SealedVolcano50 for bringing this up, @Perrry for providing evidence, @AndyXPO for the persistence and @Hester40MT for relaying this up the foodchain - and to all other contributors of course.
Believing strongly that nothing has taken as serious a hit as the weather depiction with SU5 and mainly SU7 I find it pretty frustrating that some committed users may have found a major clue for the devs to poke into and hopefully find out what is causing a once great weather depiction to be mostly generic and artificial and yet it seems to be stuck in a pile of unread topics with uncertain outcome.
I sincerely hope there’s some prioritising going on and that former official statements of the importance of the in-game weather are still valid.
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I’ ll post this here too, as i don’t know anymore what to think of the weather in ghe sim.
This was Dublin and its METAR clouds
And outside the METAR area (though nit in all airports this phenomenon happen) rhe cloyds look very good
Please, Asobo whatever is causing thise bad clouds fix it it’s been a year in November since su7 when the beautiful and realistic weather we had died!!!
At arrival in Lindon Derry another METAR area is destroying the clouds
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Yes, whatever it is just fix it. Su7 caused those issues to appear. If clouds are not changed to fit METAR, then what is it that makes it worse after su7? Why implement hard transitions and stuff if it doesn’t need to fit METAR. Then i can’t see why they needed to change it into the bad system we have after su7.
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Here is what we know about the weather engine (including what has been explained by Asobo)
- Meteoblue data is received in the form of 6 hour forecasts every 6 hours for the entire world
- MSFS does not use METAR data for cloud generation
- Hour one of the Meteoblue data includes some live data blended in by Meteoblue, and presumably Asobo only blends live data for the following hours
- If the previous is true, then between hours 1 and 2 a completely different system is likely used for blending live data. Asobo says they don’t blend METAR data for cloud generation, but that doesn’t mean Meteoblue doesn’t use some live data for its cloud generation (that would be included in the first hour of the forecast data)
- There would necessarily have to be four (potentially) hard transitions a day (every 6 hours) from the previous 6 hour batch of forecast data to the new 6 hour batch of forecast data.
- Since the data at hour 6 of the previous 6 hour forecast can be dramatically different than the data at in the first hour of the new 6 hour forecast data due to the 6 hour gap, that can result in the entire cloudscape changing from one minute to the next, and the only way to transition is by using a hard METAR-style transition due to a lack of future data during the time prior. Things change… A storm may not be where they predicted it to be 6 hours ago. They may have predicted partly cloudy skies 6 hours ago for this hour, and now it’s actually clear or overcast at the beginning of the new 6 hour batch of data, which again, includes live data from Meteoblue for the first hour, unlike hour 6 of the previous 6 hours of forecast data.
- Pre-SU7 also had rough transitions, and even worse in some cases since the forecast hour was sometimes completely messed up or corrupted weather data would be injected.
- It’s very difficult to test if the weather matches the data because we don’t have access to the raw 6 hour forecast data that Asobo has. Meteoblue’s nowcast cloud map is based on the most up to date data, including some live data, so it’s possible for MSFS to not match meteoblue’s cloud map and still be working as intended because it matches the data Asobo actually has.
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Can you please show me that. I did never experience a hard transition pre su7 if i’m not manually changed my system time. Thats not possible to do after su7 though.
This thread started after su7 that shows it is much more noticable after su7. Never seen a thread like that pre su7.
But we should have on the world map in the sim where we should plan our flights. Actuallly do we need to check if the real weather matches something? Nothing matches the real weather either. It’s the METAR that should match the weather at the time it’s reported not the way around IRL because thats impossible because the real weather is fluid/dynamic and we can’t manipulate the real weather with METAR. One second later it may have changed already. That feel i want to have instead of a weather that is forced into a METAR state to match it for 30 minutes. I don’t need to check if it matches 100%. I can use Meteoblue to predict the weather and that i could do pre su7. I know it had some issues with data, but those could have been fixed instead of completely change weather system.
For example: I reported 225@3KTS to zendesk as soon as the sim were released 2020 that it didn’t matched Meteoblue. Instead of fixing the Meteoblue data they inserted METAR winds instead that made the winds behave strange as soon as we came close to the airport. The winds feels so much more natural over non METAR airports now when they also fixed Meteoblue winds. But at METAR airports we have two types of winds now. Same with that fog layer that suddenly appears from nowhere. Clouds may not be changed but they behave strange after su7.
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I’m new to the topic, to which there are several threads, so please forgive me if this wasn’t discussed before - I have a Pi-Hole installation running in my network, so I am able to log and block calls to specific internet sites for network devices such as my PC. Would it help to try and sample out the METAR loading calls and what would happen if I blocked those? Has anybody tried that?
(Well, right now I can’t even start the sim, it claims it can’t verify my license because I’m offline and so does the MS Store. oO Well - a reboot solved that after my PC was up for a few days. But now apparently the SU10 is coming in. sigh Just the one moment I’m not waiting for it to arrive.)
SU7 was released on 18/11/2021. I ran a search for a few keywords with the constraint of being prior to 01/11/2021.
One thread I found was this:
I’m at work, and don’t have access to the link so I can’t say for sure what it shows right now.
Other than that one post I can’t find a single one discussing sudden shifts in weather depiction, just the usual ones about live sim weather not matching the real world etc.
I just checked the link on my phone, hoping it was a movie, but it was a static image. The image on the left showed the plane above some cloud cover with some puffy clouds at a higher altitude, and on the right was just a white space, so I’m not entirely sure what to make of that.
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Me neither. The weather was dynamic but consistent before they messed with it. Clouds moved, formed and dissipated in an organic way. If you could see a clear area in the distance you could be sure that it was still clear once you got there. Same with areas packed in clouds. Unless of course the wind slowly and visibly pushed the clouds towards or away from an area in the time it took you to get there. But no unrealistic snap of the finger weather changes.
That’s why I was so incredibly happy with the weather engine. Hard transitions were an issue that I always hated in FSX and P3D, and I was over the moon that they didn’t occur anymore in MSFS. Well, that dream ended quickly…
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As soon as you show me your screenshots of clouds in SU6 that I can’t reproduced in SU10 
. (Just kidding), but seriously, there has always been transitions at certain hours because it’s not possible for there to not be. Perhaps it was extended over a longer period of time back then, but there was definitely transitions. And I’m not even counting the transitions to the wrong forecast hours or to corrupted data (people who fly in Europe may not have experienced this as much due to the hours it happened)
How about this, explain to me how it’s even possible to go from the final hour of the previous forecast data to the first hour of the new forecast data (which includes live data from Meteoblue btw) without there being a transition (some sort of blending). We’re talking about suddenly jumping to new data that is suddenly 6 or even 12 hours more recent AND contains additional data (live data from Meteoblue). All that smooth flowing weather that you and I both really want only happens within the 6 or 12 hour forecast data, not between sets of forecast data. Going from the final hour of the last set of data to the first hour of the new set of data is really not much different than a sudden METAR change. The reason the weather CAN BE smooth within the forecast data is because the sim knows what the weather is supposed to be in an hour and Meteoblue generated all that data at once using their model, so it smoothly flows from hour to hour within the set of forecast data. That data doesn’t smoothly transition into the next 6 or 12 hour batch of data because that new batch of data was generated 6 or 12 hours later. If the final hour of the last batch of forecast data calls for overcast skies over Los Angeles and hour one of the new batch of forecast data calls for the clouds to actually be 5 miles away instead and it be clear skies over Los Angeles (because things can change in that time), how could MSFS smoothly transition to that? All that it can do is simultaneously fade-out the overcast skies and fade-in the clear skies, like with METAR. They can either do it quickly (more ‘accurate’ data sooner, but jarring) or they can do it slowly (less accurate, but a title less jarring). Either way, it won’t be smoothly flowing like the hours prior.
I made similar bug reports. But it was based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how the system was supposed to work, and of course everything was incredibly buggy back then… Our only data source is the Meteoblue Nowcast map which includes live data from METAR etc and their most up to date model data, while the sim has forecast data that can be 6 or 12 hours old. But your comment itself demonstrates a very important problem. Asobo didn’t properly explain how the system was SUPPOSED to work and thus people kept complaining that the weather didn’t match sources that it wasn’t supposed to match, and Asobo started making changes to try to please the people complaining. This is why it’s very frustrating to see people complaining about the clouds not matching METAR, including people who claim they don’t want METAR to be used… It makes no sense to me.
Agreed. The clouds have been consistently downgraded since release… Until SU10. This is the first update where the weather has been significantly upgraded.
If you’re in Europe or only fly during those hours, that could explain why you didn’t see all the bugs before SU7. For quite a while the forecast data was only injected properly during the hours that Europeans were awake. In America, the weather was often bugged out during the day because wrong or corrupted forecast data was being injected while Europeans were sleeping, and Asobo didn’t catch it for a long time because they only tested it during the day (in France).
True story: SU10 is the first time the clouds has ever reliably matched live conditions in Southern California during the day, at least in my tests. Before SU7, incorrect or corrupted forecast data was received for the area. Between SU7 and SU9, the clouds weren’t generated properly. Now Southern California has “proper” forecast data being injected and the cloud generation matches pretty close, with no interference from METAR. It’s to the point where even the microclimates in the mountains are pretty close to accurate. That’s very impressive to me.
The big issue may be that we get different quality in weather depending on what timezone we are usually flying in. That has been an issue since release as you mentioning and i think that those that had bad weather pre su7 has better after su7 and those that had better quality pre su7 has worse after. That why we see so many different opinions.
Agree, that many complains about METAR not matches when we do not have METAR that creates weather in the sim. That will make the weather worse. We have seen it getting worse since release. But it only getting worse for those that accepting that Meteoblue is used and notice that METAR interfare with the weather in strange ways.
I also understands that the weather needs to transition between 6hours or 12 hours data. If 6 hours data is used as it is now it needs 4 hard transitions every 24 hours compared to only 2 with 12 hours data that we had pre su7. I preffered that because i don’t need the weather to match real weather 100%. I want it to be fluid as much as possible.
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