Hi Simmers
Just a Newbie question
Im doing (at the moment) only VFR flights…but my question is about the live weather (which I am using)
How often the actual weather conditions will be updated?
Once (when I start the flight) or also during the flight depending on my psoition?
Or is the weather creation tool (I think its called Rex) recommended?
Best regards from Singapore (here the weather is heavy rain)
Lutz
The “main” weather is a forecast based off of Meteoblue data. I’m not sure how often it’s updated but I have heard speculation that it’s every 12 hours.
The weather near the ground / near airports should match METAR data within 30 minutes or so, but have noticed rain being kind of spotty. There’s a lot of threads about weather / weather not being accurate that have more information. So lower levels should be pretty close / live data, while higher levels would be more forecast.
I would first try Unreal Weather which is free, before Rex. https://unrealweather.blogspot.com/
With weather addons you may get more accuracy with rain, but the complexity of the visuals in the clouds diminishes as it’s just trying to replicate single layers reported in TAF or METAR and not the whole weather system, if that makes sense.
I have Rex and honestly prefer the visuals of the in-game weather at this point over the accuracy unless it’s way off; it’s has been better since 6-8 months ago when I purchased Rex.
Thank ytou for your answer
I will try the unrealweather
to see, if there is any difference.
I’m still flying…and it is always VERY sunny in nothern europe. Very funny (caused when I lived there, we have had seldom such a nice cloudlesss sky)
Even if it would get get metar data every 5 seconds it wouldn’t be 100% accurate. People need to understand the data comes from certain spots (weather stations). I’ve experienced weird weather in real life many times, like it’s almost clear sky and it’s raining or it’s cloudy and raining but 1km away it’s sunny and no rain or clear skies/few clouds and thunder (especially past summer).
The weather from the station is applied to the whole region so it will never match 100% to what you see out of the window.
One thing about the MSFS live weather is that the performance can vary dramatically based on location. I can fly in Germany and have a smooth ride but everytime i’m above the UK the game can be a big lag nightmare because the weather engine seems to adjust weather and clouds every 2 or 3 minutes.
12 hours is a long time for weather in the southern US. We can experience all four seasons in 12 hours.
Live Weather in Flight Simulator might be updated as frequently as every hour. That’s how often many METARs are updated, and how often the Meteoblue model issues forecasts. The weather is probably blended between these hours too, so it looks like it’s constantly changing.
Live Weather definitely changes more often than 12 hours in the sim. 12 hours is how often the Meteoblue model runs, but it issues forecasts for every hour each time it runs.
But the problem is we have no idea how often it’s actually updating because Flight Simulator doesn’t tell us what data it’s using or how old it is. So if the server is down, or it’s feeding you old or bad data, you might never know.
Ok, thank you
Pure speculation, but I wonder if CAVOK in METARs can have anything to do with that? I wonder what would be depicted in these cases:
In the first case there is no contradiction and the scattered clouds should be depicted.
In the second case maybe there are no clouds, or maybe the cloud base is just higher and there are scattered clouds at 5100 ft; no way of telling from the METAR.
If the sim lets a METAR saying CAVOK resulting in clear skies it would be a problem.
And another reason for why purely METAR-based weather is insufficient for the sim.
According to forum consensus, the sim never uses METARs to set the cloud layers, only surface winds, pressure and temps. And probably because of limitations like this.
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