What is the best real weather add on please. Opinions ??
Depends on what you are trying to achieve.
Thanks. an acurate as possible live weather program is what I was hoping for.
Again, it may depend on what you mean by āaccuracyā. As of now, you have a choice between using the stock āliveā weather, which when it is working (it does most of the time for me) makes a pretty good effort at modelling large-scale weather systems (though there are issues with it), and mods which inject local METAR data into a large scale model, with the intention of duplicating real live METAR more accurately. Which is fine up to a point, but inevitably leads to discontinuities as you move from ālocal METARā to the bigger model. And METARs arenāt live data anyway - they are records of what the weather was doing when the observations were made.
Personally, Iām happy with the stock weather, or at least prefer being able to see changes in weather coming visually. Other people seem to want METAR-matching, and can put up with the issues it raises.
Note that despite what some on this forum have claimed, it isnāt actually possible to duplicate real-world weather in real time, for several reasons - most notably because the data doesnāt exist. ALL large-scale weather sources use models to āfill inā for data they donāt have, and METARs are no use when you are half way across the Pacific, at 35,000 ft. Other data may be available, but again, it wonāt be āliveā. Weather changes between observations: if it didnāt the meteorologists wouldnāt need to model itā¦
I think thereās only REX currently. Even then, itās a bit iffy too, there has been a recent update allegedly fixing the frame rate issues however.
The native one! There is NO NEED for an external weather addon!
Yes, there is a urgent need to a better real or live weather solution. Do my a favor. Go to SEQM airport, select the MSFS live weather option and now compare the indicated OAT and QNH (pressing B) that you get versus the actual METAR for SEQM. And tell me about the horrendous difference that you get always, guaranteedā¦ now tell me how are you gonna handle that? I bet you are saying you donāt need a weather solutions because you are just happy looking at the shapes of the clouds and have no idea what I am talking about, are you?
Yesā¦
Agree, no other than internal weather system but user asked about Addon
Any addon that I can type the airport ICAO and retrieve the current METAR from MSFS? I often need to plan my approach mid flight and depend on weather information of my destination. The appropriate way would be to use the MCDU (A320) but most pages/functions are not implemented. Tuning in the ATIS frequency does not work. Nearest airport is not an option as well.
I could easily get the METAR from external sources but as you guessed, they are very different from the MSFS one.
With respect if your avatar points to your identity,
he ask about weather addon, next to internal weather system
Yup. One of the more obvious flaws with MSFS stock live weather modelling is that it totally screws up temperatures for high-altitude airports, and over high terrain in general.
Iām not sure how well the paid-for alternative, REX, handles this though. Where does it get its outside-of-METAR-range weather from? and does it suffer from the same issue?
That is a pretty valuable observation actually. Here in the Netherlands/Belgium the weather usually is quite spot-on. But I can imagine they failed to correct for airport elevation in their weather model.
As someone mentioned, there is REX Weather Force, around 20 bucks depending on your currency.
Iām so far happy with. Not impressed, but happy enough to be sure I have the most accurate metar weather available wherever I fly.
It also tells you which metar is reading, and you can check the metar at any location.
Not affiliated in any way with the product, just my 2 cents.
Edit: you may not need this at all if you are happy with stock weather, but man are there more than obvious differences sometimesā¦
Iām sure Iām not the first person to notice it. The trouble is, actual comments regarding the specifics of issues with weather modelling tend to get drowned out by endless posts just saying itās all ābrokenā, and the sim is āunplayableā. Even if the first is true (which partly depends on expectations anyway) the second self-evidently isnāt.
Back to the original question, Iāve been happily bimbling around for weeks (in IFR, or pushing-my-luck IFR-into-IMC) using stock weather, and Windy.com as my general guide to what to expect when I get where Iām going to. Sometimes it is spot on, sometimes it isnāt. Which as far as realism goes, is about as ārealisticā as weather forecasting ever is. Iām quite sure that the real-world pilots amongst us (there seem to be quite a few) prefer to trust what their eyes actually tell them if there is a humongous thundercloud sitting over their destination, than rely on a METAR that says it wasnāt there when they last checked. The weather changes first, and then the METARā¦
Probably not, but itās the first time Iāve read it. And Iāve read a lot of forum posts
Amen
Iām not even sure why there is so much emphasis on METARs. That is a single observation in time and space for an airfield. It is out of date the second after it is logged and way before it ever makes it onto the broadcasts/get disseminated.
If you want to know what the weather will be like at an airfield for planning purposes youād be better off with the TAF as that is a forecast over time specific to that airfield. I could see that being used to generate a time series of data for a location to give effects of weather changing over time. But that only works for that specific location. Everything else would have to be interpolated which meteorologically speaking is pretty much garbage unless you have all the computing power to do field modification etc.
Yes, Live Weather is definitely applying some kind of incorrect correction factor to temperature based on the altitude of the terrain. It is as if it is taking the temperature in the model for that location and descending the air parcel adiabatically to sea level at 1.9 degrees C per thousand feet.
SEQM is 7,910 feet. I wonāt have a chance to try this until tonight, but Iām curious what would happen if an aircraft spawns at SEQM with the āclear skyā preset enabled. This should give the ISA temperature for 7,900 feet, which would be almost exactly 0 C (32F).
At a guess, because simmers have been using them as ābest representation of realityā for years, and have got used to the idea.
Iāve not done the calculation (and couldnāt, without more information than Iāve got) but I suspect that less than 1% of the flyable-in portion of the Earthās atmosphere is within sensible range of METARs anyway. You need broader coverage to actually model weather, either for a sim or for real-life purposes. Itās three-dimensional, and the role-model for chaotic systems. You can observe it. You can guess what its going to do next. You sure as hell canāt predict it with certainty. Which is why METARs are needed. To keep pilots up to date on how the weather has failed to meet your earlier predictionsā¦