It seems always too frozen. For example, I just started a flight at Seward (PAWD) and it was snow-white with a frozen sea! Looking at metar, seems there are 12 degress celsius there right now.
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It has something to do with the resolution of the “snow map” Asobo/MS recieves from their weather provider. Apparently it is not of sufficient detail so that if there is snow on mountaintops you will often find that you get frozen lakes as well.
They mentioned that they were aware of the problem in a dev video some time ago, but I have not seen any more information on the topic since.
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Well, I think they can assume most oceans don’t freeze, even when land does. Or they can cross it with temperature and altitude data - it doesn’t make sense that at 12 degrees near sea level anything will be completely white.
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The data does exist, but MS/Asobo does not make the data, they acquire it from their provider. They are not provided with data that is accurate enough and that’s what they need to fix. Probably something they are going to focus on as it would also be beneficial to MSFS2024 with its more advanced weather depiction.
As I said, they are aware of it and it is reasonable to assume that they would want it to be fixed as much as we do.
The weather in Alaska sukcs…
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Trouble is that it isn’t that simple… You can’t just say “it’s above zero, so no snow”. The mountains along the pacific coast of Alaska and British Columbia get massive amounts of snow in the winter as the moisture from the ocean is carried inland. It takes a long time for it all to melt in the summer, and it isn’t unusual to still have large amounts of snow on the ground in places when it’s +20°C (my kids and I often bring a crazy carpet to go sledding when we go on hikes in the summer). As others have said, it needs better snow cover data from MeteoBlue.
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Flew to Anchorage yeysterday… 20mls out in the mountains snow and frozen lakes… the city itself no snow. WHen i look at webcams around not much snow on the mountains surrounding the city
Same as this:
Snow partially at low altitudes at 19°C in LOWI - Bug Reports / Weather & Live Weather - Microsoft Flight Simulator Forums
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It’s a known issue. They are aware and promised us an update in a Q&A sometime last year. Nothing ever came off it.
Unlikely anything will be done until 2024 at this point. Just gotta live with it.
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For context; his is an example of the snow depth data layer on Windy.com (I think you can compare that to the Meteoblue data MSFS utilizes);
as you can see it’s registering 5m of snow in the mountains, and at some points at the coast.
If you zoom in, you can see the resolution of te data doesn’t change much, so it won’t show lack of snow in valleys for example;
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The webcams will only show you the front ranges around the city. They’re not that high and don’t hold much snow. The peaks further back will have more of it. But even so, as @MortThe2nd pointed out, the resolution of the source data is low. (e.g. There’s currently no snow in Whittier, and the bay there doesn’t even freeze in winter.)
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