no acknowledgment about the whole downgrade of the weather! it’s really becoming upsetting, well over a year since the dreadful su7, and aside with no thunderstorms there is a huge lack of clouds variety and everything that has been reported over and over in this forum? I find myself with this game that is something different from what i bought and from what it was advertised weather wise. Why can’t we have at least some explanation? I don’t know for sure if all of this mess si because of the interference of METAR which has now been logged as a bug, but now even with su12 this bugs (a year and a half after su7) are still not addressed, instead they add and add and the weather never get the attention it deserve nor we get and explanation on what’s going on…
Could not agree more. Summed up perfectly i think. SU7 was absolutely terrible, and things looked up with SU10, but we seem to have gone backwards again.
I am so frustrated that the lack of Thunderstorm info is continuing to be ignored
METAR implementation does not work either. I’ve purposely sat at airports with real life thunderstorms occurring nearby, with a METAR that notes the thunderstorms and there is nothing but rain in MSFS.
Frankly the weather doesn’t even hold a candle to FS2004, it was better almost 20 years ago 20 freaking years! Had cold fronts, dynamic changing weather, cloud variety, thunderstorms (gasp) and seasons with changing foliage depending on time of year.
The bottom of the locked thread will explain why. Typically it’s when duplicate threads are created, then their either close or merge into a larger thread.
Here we are. March 2023. Flying right down this line of spring storms in the mid-west USA and not one flash. This really needs to be addressed.
Sim pilots have always flown towards bad weather if it’s for the challenge or the incredible visuals we’ve had over the years. T-Storms really need to urgently be programmed back in some reasonable way.
That’s why I will always say Live Weather is “broken”. Baffles me how people will go on and on about the clouds in Live Weatherbut the complete lack of Thunderstorms gets very little attention.
It completely breaks any sense of realism when the Earth is devoid of any lightning happening.
It wasn’t that long ago when we had them everywhere. I even remember a few occasions where I had lightning inside the cockpit!
That’s why they can’t simply bring the lightning back. Lightning was hopelessly broken since its release as it was shorting out the entire atmosphere even in nearly clear skies. First, they need to go back and work on drawing plausible Live Weather cumulonimbus, and implementing semi realistic updrafts, downdrafts, and wind shear. These are much more important foundational steps for recreating significant aviation weather. After that they need to actually couple the lightning to deep Cb convection instead of allowing any translucent puff to shoot sparks. Only THEN can they think about increasing the lightning occurence frequency again.
Sounds like a huge amount of work, and I’m not surprised it’s simply on the back burner or even shelved. There are hundreds of other important things they’re trying to do at the same time.
I live at the south end of your pic and went out in the F-22 around the same time last night and also saw nothing. I was hoping for a light show. I’ve, however, seen plenty of lightning in storms in SE Asia.
Yeah, for what it’s worth, Live Weather lightning seems to be strongly tied to how much atmospheric instability there is and/or possibly the humidity as well. it’s not really gone, I think they just increased the threshold such that the conditions needed for it are pretty uncommon. You can still find it in the tropics and southern hemisphere this time of year where CAPE and dewpoint are quite high. I saw a lot of lightning by Darwin not long ago.
But the big weather system currently moving through US doesn’t have a whole lot of CAPE despite the extreme dynamics creating a massive line of severe thunderstorms. So the simulator’s lightning trigger probably isn’t activated as a result.
When i check the weather debug tool there is a thing that says thunderstom probability in %. I wonder what decides that %. I’ve only seen it at 0%. But i have not searched for thunderstorms though.
But again this makes no sense as thunderstorms and lightning are listed in METAR, so nothing is being represented correctly when it comes to thunderstorms.
They probably never connected the METAR observations to the lightning slider. It’s probably only the Meteoblue forecast model that dictates whether or not there’s lightning. To be honest, I don’t think they could ever get METAR based thunderstorms working correctly. One minute there’d be clear skies, and then the next minute when the METAR updates with thunder in the vicinity, suddenly there’s a giant thunderstorm? Talk about pop-in weather. 
It worked in FS2004! Distant lighting, METAR updating every 15 mins. You would get a good visual representation of weather from a simulator nearly 20 years old.
I totally agree. Look at the fog how that is made. But for sure it’s possible if they want to focus on making it believable. But that requires alot of research and development time. For example a thunderstorm mentioned on a METAR could be trigger to make thunderstorm form realistically near the airport over time. As we all know thunderstorms is really unpredictable and can form fast and move really fast. 1 minutes it can be thunderstorm over our head next few minutes clear skies. But the weather always forms dynamically in the real world. In fs 2004 there were textures as clouds. Not dynamic at all and i bet much easier to work with and those textures are same all the time.
I preffer a global weather that fits everywhere though as i have pointed out many times. It’s hard to make everything fit many different sources of weather. I bet that is the hardest thing to manage. Because we all know that the future weather is not always as we expect it to be. And thunderstorms is really hard to predict exactly where it will happen.
Lightning looked great in FS4 even given the polygonal graphics with which it was working. But our METARs generally update hourly. As Perrry and others mention, the trick is getting a METAR storm to behave with Flight Simulator’s global dynamic and volumetric weather, which FS2004 didn’t have. Say a METAR updates for a summertime pop-up thunderstorm in the vicinity. By the time you grow a big enough Cb to produce lightning, the storm will have probably moved away or dissipated. The next METAR update comes in CAVOK and you’ve got a giant Cb near the field still, so the weather will never match. Or it will be out of place from what the adjacent weather is doing. It’ll cause issues one way or the other.
Dam I didn’t know they removed lighting not good then this makes live weather false
Lightning has not been removed. However, it’s not creating it in most situations. What the developers removed was lightning occurring in clear skies.
Ok thanks 
I have not seen any lightning in a year, that is unacceptable when it has been occurring all winter in the Southern US with severe storms weekly. I place myself in every cold front with high precipitation rate and it’s just rain out the window.