So more times than not I am totally surprised by the wind direction, visibility and rwy assignment when approaching an airport with live weather. Supposedly Meteoblue feeds the sim with weather data, so I pulled up their online weather maps, which showed good visibility and moderate winds 220deg at CYYT St. Johns. ATC gave me rwy 11, and was greeted by fog until almost minimums, with a cross/tailwind of about 130deg. Also, in the Working Title CJ4, the source for the METAR data in the FMC is MSFS, and that data doesn’t match up with the conditions on the approach either.
In short, what are some strategies to get accurate weather data for a destination airfield without cheating and spawning at the destination before starting my flight?
I base my weather on the meteoblue map then I call ATC when enroute to get the current destination weather. It is realistic and works fine in sim. The Meteoblue site is pretty accurate for me as long as I am using the current live weather. IE: Launch using the Clear Skies preset then on the tarmac select live weather (Live weather, not live time…)
If no ATC is available then I overfly the airport. If I can’t do that then I should, of course, divert.
I’ve read this a few times now. What’s this about starting with clear skies and then switching to live? I’ve used live weather since day 1. It’s been pretty darn accurate for a long time now.
A lot of people had issues, with the main one being that they would fly a session, then start a second session and find the weather had switched from live to clear sky.
There were others that had an issue where it was always clear skies when they flew their first mission, or that after leaving the gournd, in mid flight weather would suddenly clear up and change into clear skies.
People found ways to get around it. They would start the second flight, or while in-flight, they would switch to clear skies, and then back to live weather. That would sometimes fix it and reload live weather for that flight.
If you search, you will find lots of posts about this.
I’ve adopted the strategy of switching to live weather from clear skies and it seems to enable it ok. If an airfield has ATIS it usually comes up on the ATC menu only when I’m in pretty close. It would be nice if it was available before ATC gives me my rwy assignment.
For a few weeks I would have it enabled on the world map, then when I spawned in at my departure airport it was always clear skies, 02kt wind and 29.92 barometer. Then I heard of that workaround here on the forum somewhere and it worked consistently. Not sure if the WU4 update made any improvements to that. I haven’t tried it yet.
Remember that METARs can be up to an hour old and ATIS, and in particular the reported ceiling, can be (and often is) very wrong. And I’m talking in real life.
I think there are a few issues here. Sometimes the sim can’t get real world data, or gets data that doesn’t match the real world. Sometimes the sim gives wildly different weather a few minutes a part.
I was flying into Rome, when I first got ATIS it reports wind straight down the runway at 54(!) knots. Cleared for approach, ATC calls 10kt direct left cross. Cleared for final, now ATC says 8kt direct right cross. This was all from in-game sources, and I was in the CJ4, so the time wasn’t that far apart.
If you are using the in game live weather, you can get metar reports online for almost every airport in the world by simply searching for “metar XXXX” where XXXX is the ICAO of your airport. I start every flight with this information staged in two browser tabs.
Also, like I did in the real world, before getting the metar information set your airplane altimeter until the altitude reads the charted airport altitude. Then verify what that setting is with the published metar data. Metars are NOT published every minute so event he most current one can have dated information, particularly when dynamic weather systems are present. You want your altitude and actual airport altitude to be correct.
I think you’d struggle to get an answer to that question out of a meteorologist to be honest. Most of the forecasts you see are collated from different data sets and include an element of educated guesswork.
I use AWC and then get current forecast conditions from Windytv.com. The latter is pretty useful for conditions at flight levels.
Ya, that’s why I was a little surprised that the METAR report that the FMC pulls in for the Working Title CJ4 didn’t seem too accurate, at least for that airport. I’ll keep playing around with it.
Oh in the sim they don’t use METARs to display weather at airports. Well they use some values like temp dewpoint and altimeter. But the Meteoblue forecast is what creates cloud layers and vis and rain/snow etc.
For me in MN, USA - the weather is usually far off…about 4-8 hours old when compared to the METAR. I use Unreal weather for takeoff and landing and then switch back to LIVE enroute.