I’ve seen a lot of people complain that the weather engine is broken, and doesn’t work, but almost no-one explaining why it is so broken. Can someone please explain that?
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Yesterday flight LEBL-LEPA with real weather selected. According to real weather met services a lot of Cb were expected over LEPA.
Never viewed any Cumulo Nimbus (Cb) no more thundertrom, ceiling and visibility OK CAVOK !
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“Broken” would be too harsh, your post is tagged “Gliders” so I guess you’re referring to issues that are most noticeable to glider pilots, i.e. anything to do with the air going up or down vs. sideways.
This list could be extensive if we attempted to describe what ‘perfect’ would look like so instead I’ll highlight the main issues that make weather in MSFS at the very least extremely difficult to configure for soaring:
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‘Ground lift’: Asobo have implemented a game concept we call “ground lift”, i.e. all ground produces lift, with the strength varying by ground type, unrelated to any clouds. The average strength of this widespread lift dominates the entire sim and we don’t seem to be able to turn it off unless we set the wind speed to zero and turn off ALL lift in the sim. The best thing for Asobo to do would be to give this ‘turbulence’ an accurate average net-zero value (I really do mean EXACTLY ZERO, that could give whatever turbulence Asobo want but not confuse the algorithms that generate net lift or sink), our only concern is the thermal strength (below) also needs to be improved otherwise we’ll lose an unreal massive source of lift but not have the more realistic lift working.
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‘Thermals’: Cumulus clouds in RL usually have very distinctive rising columns of air (called thermals) rising into their base, the majority of soaring uses these thermals as the primary source of lift. In MSFS any rising air associated with clouds is weak, non-existent under most clouds, and never aligned with the cloud. So it’s hard to see how thermals could be worse TBH. It took a lot of detective work to decide some air rising in the blue sky upwind of the cloud is actually Asobo’s implementation of the thermal that condenses to form the cloud. Our recommendation is to increase the strength of this lift, remove the wind strength dependency, and align the rising air vertically with the cloud (in the airmass frame-of-reference).
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‘Ridge lift’: Ridge lift in MSFS seems to extend very high into the atmosphere, even for a 500 foot ridge 10000 feet beneath you. This combined with the ‘ground lift’ significantly distorts searching for lift in the mountains i.e. the lift is best in the center of valleys because you might get a combination of some ridge lift plus ground lift from that location (i.e. from a tiny local slope in the bottom of the valley far beneath you). In RL you’d be hugging the into-wind slope like a champ, getting both the ridge lift you’d expect plus the thermals from the valley will tend to rise up the downwind slopes. I’d also prefer Asobo to check the ground elevations more upwind of the plane so their algorithm knows the ridge underneath you is shadowed behind higher terrain upwind, but that’s new code not just tweaking the existing numbers.
For each of these issues we’ve evolved weather settings that make the (soaring) weather ‘less broken’ using tricks to manipulate the wind up and down as the pilot crosses the terrain, but it’s definitely a pretty hairy workaround. It’s giving us fun multiplayer soaring flights in consistently stunning scenery and that keeps us going.
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I should add if you use ‘live weather’, i.e. MSFS weather settings derived from real-world METARS, that will have none of the extremely carefully crafted workarounds we’ve evolved for usable soaring weather in MSFS, so basically you will be relying heavily on the ‘ground lift’. I.e. MSFS will paint patches of rising air pretty much at random across the entire landscape and there won’t be any clues (unless you know the algorithm MSFS is using - hint: sand lift is great). The clouds won’t be working. If you can find a location where the real-world weather says a strong wind will be blowing in the right direction, then you stand a reasonable chance of ridge lift but TBH you’re likely to find the ground lift better than that.
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Thanks for the info. Do you know if any more is known about Asobo’s intentions of implementing the “realistic model” over the current “easy” model (ground lift galore) as described here?
The existence of a ‘realistic model’ has gained almost mythological status but I’m pretty sure in reality Asobo is looking at tweaking parameters in their existing code. That could be announced as a ‘realistic model’ but IMHO that’s a bit of a stretch. It’s just possible Asobo are having a think about whether to throw away their current lift/sink weather code and start afresh with what they’ve learned since but I’ve not detected any suggestion of that. MSFS soaring weather could be ok if it’s possible for Asobo to adjust their ground-based turbulence to be net-zero, and have a soarable thermal with a life-cycle under every cloud, but perhaps that’s simply not doable with their current technology. I think if Asobo had known that Cumulus clouds and thermals are the same thing at the beginning they would have implemented things differently.
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Moved to World which is more appropriate 
Snow coverage is also broken. Innsbruck Airport is the best example where you can find snow with temperatures over 20*C. Snow should be only on top of the surrounding mountains, but MSFS covers the entire area with a white blanket.
Those a a lot of problems…