UPDATE
As I explained on my stream from last night, I kind of had an epiphany yesterday as to why the live weather UI is designed the way it is. I waited all day to finally go home to test it and after all that, it actually makes a bit more sense. Note: the VOD will only be good for 60 days from today. I may make it into a YouTube at some point, but I’ll probably keep talking about it on my streams (I think I explained it fully three different times throughout last night).
First, keep in mind that the general premise is the weather you get is the weather that existed at the scheduled mission time, whenever that was in the past 24 hours. That could also be the current time, but only if the mission time coincides with the actual UTC time. I believe they designed it this way to keep us from flying at night - forcing everything to within a fairly narrow daytime time band.
Going back to the weather time slider in the mission selector screen and the “red-dot,” it didn’t make sense until I realized that there’s some map layers that are a little hidden and certainly not well-publicized (more on that later).
It turns out that if you want an overview of what the winds are going to be for your flight, you need to set something else up first:
Go into the mission map, click the layers icon in the lower right corner. Select “advanced,” which then brings up the layers - select weather layer: “wind,” and wind effect: “ground” “low” or “high.” It’ll take several seconds but the map should generate a “heat map” with color designating the general intensity of the wind and then wind trace lines kind of like you’d see on windy.com
Now, find the mission you want, then move the time slider to that mission time (you’ll have to convert it to UTC, which is an annoying UI oversight), which will then display the red dot when you’re at the time. Let go of the slider and it’ll take about 10 seconds or so, then the winds will update to whatever time for which the time slider is set. Now you know the general winds for your flight. Check “ground” for surface winds, “low” for winds that those of us on last nights stream think are at about 6000’-ish? And “high” for winds at about 30,000’-ish. More testing or confirmation needed (why it doesn’t say the altitude right there in the UI is beyond me - bad decision).
But I matched this to historic and live winds at aviationweather.gov and it matched almost perfectly.
So now you have no excuse to fly into heavy winds. Unless, and this is a big unless, there are still bugs. I still think some people in Europe especially are getting a raw deal - it’s injecting nonsense, but now you have a way to verify it inside the sim - to know what the sim thinks it’s supposed to be giving you. If you find it to be a big discrepancy, it’s time to do a bug report with your location, altitude, in-sim UTC time, and real UTC time and date.
Is this enough information to do proper preflight planning? No. But it is a good general overview as to what you’re about to get into. I still highly recommend looking at aviationweather.gov or SimBrief/Navigraph because there is still a lot more to it - forecast-wise (it’s not static for 3-5 hours, you know), and because surface, 6000 and 30,000’ leaves a lot of room in middle that is going to be different. You can’t plan a flight at 12,000’ using winds at 6,000’ - I proved that on a mission last night in which the difference in altitude generated a 20 knot difference in headwind component (which was verified as correct using aviationweather.gov.- so the sim is injecting fairly correct weather, at least where I’m flying in the US).
Is it still clunky UI? Yes. Having to change the time slider to generate the red dot and waiting for the winds to update for each individual mission you’re looking at takes time and is annoying.
But it does now make a little more sense.
Now, why someone from Asobo hasn’t been screaming this from the rooftops, instead letting us wallow, get frustrated, complain, quit, and frankly, abuse people is beyond me. This could have been well-clarified a long time ago.
My other observations about the clunky mission briefing UI, the lack of information there, and more still stand.
Anyway, hopefully this helps.