Well msfs 24 looks just bad so i aint moving over for awhile
Hunting for years without succes … finally had my once in a lifetime thunderstorm within msfs204
South of panama, departed at SKJU (whatever it is… not ideal to takeoff from^^)
I too just got saw my first Live Weather lightning in FS24, only because I went actively looking for it. Unstable areas in the tropics and subtropics with showery weather are good places to look, but it’s real hit or miss. Florida and northern South America are good spots, and there’s a lot of convective activity over Miami right now:
If you turn on Developer Mode under Debug->Weather, there’s a parameter called Ambient Thunder Prob. You’ll only see lightning if that value is greater than zero, and it’s dependent on your location, not the storm’s location, so you’ll have to move around (or use slew like I did) until you get a non-zero value.
I was happy to see that, in my case at least, the lightning was only coming out of precipitation producing showers, and not stray puffs of clouds. Looks like we still don’t have believable cumulonimbus from the video in the post above mine though. 
So this proves it’s coded in the sim… but they need to tinker with it, particularly with thunderstorms not being depicted well in the sim. As some have said above, this might be a more USA thing (not seeing many storms or even lightning like we used to a few years back)
this is great info, thank you for sharing. Hopefully the devs can tinker with the ‘Ambient Thunder Prob’ and make it more realistic and current in live weather. I’ve flown a few times around storms here in Texas, in MSFS 2024, and just cloud cover. Not even precip would show until I was actually on the ground.
This issue goes pretty deep and is going to require a lot more work than tinkering with that one parameter I’m afraid. The ambient thunder parameter apparently only shows if some conditions are favorable for lightning producing storms at the player’s location, and is a product of humidity and atmospheric instability (we’re guessing). It doesn’t actually indicate if there are storms in the area. Apparently the simulator doesn’t know where its cumulonimbus are or how to attach lightning to them. And that’s weird because the game can draw rain coming out of convection and plot this on a radar screen, so lightning should be a similar extension. But apparently they designed this to work something like: Is the air around me favorable for lightning flashes? If yes, then turn on the lightning switch. The problem this creates is that if there aren’t appropriate Cbs in the area, then lightning bolts start coming out of inappropriate clouds like tiny puffballs. And boy oh boy did it ever in places with high humidity and instability. Every partly cloudy afternoon in Florida turned into the apocalypse with lightning flashes and thunder everywhere but no actual visible storms. Rather than go back to the drawing board and redesign how lightning should work, ie rework the formation of Cbs and the attachment of lightning to them, Asobo just put a bandaid fix on this by increasing the amount of humidity and instability needed for the ambient thunder parameter to get switched on. The exact same problem is still there, it just happens less often now simply because lightning is now much more rare. And this also has the consequence of almost entirely killing the lightning in places that don’t have a lot of humidity and instability all the time, so when thunderstorms actually do pass through higher latitudes, the lightning is often missing.
This years old issue has now been carried over to 2024. They’re probably going to have to overhaul the weather system with a Sim Update :\
You should be on the weather dev team. They really need people with your expertise. I feel there isn’t enough of that, especially as it pertains to convective weather.
I would be all for “THE weather update”.
I totally would, but I’m gonna miss tornado season after relocating to Bordeaux.
Wasn’t going to say it, but that’s probably a big part of the issue, haha. And to be fair, I wouldn’t expect most US-based folks to have a lot of knowledge on, say, western pacific typhoons. The team really needs more global expertise. The sim can’t rely simply on upper-atmoshpere parametrics because the numbers are too big to crunch, not available in precise enough resolution, and the result is often too ephemeral, anyway. There’s an art to the science that only comes with deep understanding.
Same here, I created a wish for a SU dedicated just to weather and the mods decided it belonged here, merged it and closed it 
But let’s see if this can get some traction, because it really would be awesome.
well that’s "great "- especially for the accuracy and the authentic weather - that means - at least based on the observation that the weather is not really loaded everywhere but according to the position of the aircraft ! would then also explain this radomised cloud position which has already been reported here somewhere in the forum and the reduced resolution the further away the clouds are from the position - well not really an award for a simulation - sorry for saying so !
That’s effectively true for at least the lightning. It’s possible that volumetric lightning data for a whole area is preloaded into the sim, but it only uses one value at a time from where the aircraft is located. This results in a weird effect: If there’s one lightning producing cloud in the distance and “ambient thunder probability” is >0, you’ll see lightning flashes from it. But if you fly to a new location where that parameter is 0, that same cloud will stop producing lightning. It’s like you control the lightning simply by where you’re located.
I’d love to hear more about how this applies to other weather in the sim though. Are you saying the clouds are randomized based on the player’s position? So for example, two players won’t see the same clouds when flying together in multiplayer if they’re coming from different areas?
Edit: Ah I see the thread now: MSFS2024 is randomising the positions of the clouds for each person that spawns in - #2 by MSGamerTag01
I just flew from JFK to MCO. There was supposed to be CBs all the way down to South Carolina at altitudes of up to FL370. Nothing seen, even though I was using ActiveSky. Well then I hit Jacksonville and I see lightning all around me – in regular cumulus clouds below 10,000 feet. 
Asobo totally missed the concept that the cloud structure is intimately linked to the vertical air movement. It’s an understandable mistake from a game developer but a spectacular design fault in a simulation. Since the core tech was delivered in MSFS2020 there haven’t really been any substantive changes to the atmospheric (i.e. weather) simulation in MSFS so we still have wonderful fluffy perlin-noise based voxel clouds independent from the actual weather. There’s no effective API to access or control the weather either, not least because if the clouds are independent there’s not much point. Maybe, just maybe, Asobo might be able to provide a way of affecting the cloud graphics e.g. what height the clouds are at. But the weather ‘simulation’ is not much more than a wind direction and random turbulence and the odds on that changing seems pretty low.
I dream of the day these simulators can truly simulate weather to real life.
I flew from Houston to Raleigh last week in real life, at night, and as we were flying over Augusta, GA, I could see a VERY active thunderstorm way off in the distance. I had paid for WiFi, so I pulled up RadarScope to see where those storms were, and they were roughly 100 miles off the coast of the Carolinas. We are talking roughly 350 nautical miles as a crow flies from where we were at FL390. Couldn’t really see any individual bolts, but with each flash the cloud structure was fully illuminated. It kept me entertained for the remainder of the flight, ended up making my neck sore from staring out the window just enjoying the show. I could only imagine the view from the pilot’s perspective, and what other kind of views they get at night of thunderstorms on a typical basis at cruising altitude.
I’m sure that would be quite difficult to accurately simulate, but I would be content with something relatively close.
Deep understanding of science is simply more science. There’s nothing above it, but it must of course be done properly.
Exactly. The clouds are not an ornament, “cloudscape”. They are informative of the underlying weather dynamics, and thus indispensable for safe aviation.
While true in a purely pedantic way, the artistry comes in the analysis and synthesis of all the different scientific things happening to output something that is meaningful and useable, while still being accurate and timely. People who are not good at that tend to silo, hyperfocus, and miss the big picture or other pertinent details. The art is putting it together and communicating it.
It’s one thing to note when general conditions are supportive of storms. However, once they get going into the dynamic/kinematic phases it is an extremely chaotic environment. The problem is, we will never know every single bit of parametric science that’s happening up there in that kinematic environment. We can make quite a few observations (visual, radar, surface, etc) but when something doesn’t pan out the way we predicted because of something we can’t observe, it can have a devastating effect. So a lot of the “artistry” comes from educated guesses based on what we can observe.
Due to the sheer complexity of the system, you have to know which data to promote and which to reject in a shockingly short period of time. This is true for meteorologists, storm chasers, pilots, and the general public, all in different ways. But without the correct input data (again, impossible to get today) and a computer that can accurately model it (also impossible today - even the big ones only get close and have to constantly be revised/updated, especially when it shifts to a kinematic mode), we’re left with generalities, facsimiles of reality that may be close enough for a $200 simulator, but wither under close examination by experts in the field.
Some areas of the sim do this better than others, I submit that thunderstorms fall into the latter. They need help from experts into making it accurate enough to be both aesthetically pleasing for the people who don’t know or care about the science, while maintaining a modicum of operational usability for those that do. This, so we can apply our “educated guesses” to something that looks and behaves at least moderately realistically, while working within the limitations described above.