There have been countless topics on this forum about the lack of proper atmospheric haze ever since this “sim” launched. Infact in the launch trailer back in 2020, they falsely advertised a lot about atmospheric effects due to humidity, aerosols, pollution, particulate matter etc. Instead, what we have are these haze patches around airports with arbitrary ceiling of ~ 3000ft AGL which defies any logic or scientific explanation and infinite visibility otherwise, so much for being the most advanced weather system. Recent sim updates have just reduced to WT fixes and few minor fixes here and there, nothing about such glaring omissions in weather system. Even the upcoming 2024 version is tight-lipped about anything related to weather. Devs don’t like to speak about this aspect as and when they do have Q&As so those questions/comments are never considered.
Probably I’m just repeating what has already been raised earlier in these forums and not adding anything new, atleast it’s a reminder about the sorry state of affairs on something as critical as the weather system, with a hope it doesn’t land on a deaf ear.
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Actually, those “patches” make a lot of sense. The actual station is reporting reduced visibility not related to precipitation, usually due to haze, dust, smoke, or radiation fog. The tendency is to assume that those patches are the error, when, in actuality, the areas outside of the patches should likely have the same visibility issues, but for whatever reason (likely due to the inability to easily observe and report those conditions away from weather stations), the areas in between stations are not well modeled.
There are hundreds of threads about this, but we tend to groupthink into survivorship bias in which we see the observed patches as the problem, when it’s more likely that everywhere else is the problem.
How to fix that? I don’t know. As I said before, without surface observations and reports, surface visibility is very hard to model correctly and accurately, especially as you get into distances 10 statute miles and longer, as nothing outside of control towers report visibility beyond 10SM. And keep in mind those reports often feed into the modeling itself, but they’re so limited in range…
Personally, I just suspend disbelief - it’s an area of smog around a city. Or radiation fog. It is often a real-life thing, it just doesn’t look quite so dramatic, especially at the edges.
Yeah, IIRC from prior threads, some folks think the relevant needed info to simulate this is in the upstream Meteoblue weather data but MSFS doesn’t seem to be pulling it, or if it’s pulling it it’s not using it, and only inside the METAR bubbles is there any simulated haze at all.
(I’ll leave the details of haze simulation and particulates vs moisture or whatever to the experts. :D)
I’m glad you brought this up. That patch you see up ahead is for an airport reporting 6000m visibility. Now look at the data from weather debug window at current aircraft position and you’ll find obvious signs of why the visibility should be anything but infinite. Going from 15850m to 6000m over this long distance wouldn’t create the visual shock around airports that we see. Data is present, it’s just being comfortably ignored.
15850m is roughy 10 statute miles, which is the maximum visibility reported by most automated stations. However, what’s pictured there is way more than 10SM.
It goes back to the fact that there is no data between stations. So 10SM becomes the baseline, whether it’s around an airport that’s reporting it or not. But worse, the actual visibility represented is much farther.
What was causing the reduced visibility at the airport ahead of you and what do you think the actual surface visibility was in the area below you?
I’m not the one making the claim. You’re positing that it’s moving. If you want consensus, you need to provide evidence of where and how much, and show the resulting visual representation.
Also, is ambient visibility airborne or surface? Ambient temperature is certainly airborne. If it’s the visibility from the aircraft, it goes back to my question - where and when do you see it reduce and what’s visibly causing that reduction?
Correct and afaik infinite visibility is reported as 9999 in aviation weather forecasts.
In addition: I think that it would require hardware that doesn’t even exists atm and not even will be in the coming 10 yrs or so.
Crisp clear views till the horizon is nice to see irl but to me, the current situation in our beloved sim is more than acceptable.
Correct. Which is why TAFs in the US only go to 6SM (~9999m, rounded to the nearest SM) and anything beyond is forecast P6SM “greater than 6 statute miles.”
And that’s, of course, forecast surface visibility within 5SM of the forecast aerodrome.
Again I wouldn’t know the range as to how low or high this ambient visibility number can go since it’s weather engine’s calculation.
I would say a potential solution can be to use this number and create low visibility till the cloud base or temperature inversion altitude. That would be just in line with what I’ve seen in my real flights as well around this region.
Sorry to say but it doesn’t happen as frequently IRL
When haze within METAR areas was added some number of sim updates back, I remember being quite surprised at how hazy everything was throughout the Los Angeles basin, and how much clearer it was farther away from the busy urban airspace. Then I looked at my photos from real-world airliner flights and was reminded that the real world is usually pretty hazy too, both near and between airports.
This is an old topic and there’s been much virtual ink already spilled on prior threads.
“Ambient” in this case is meaningless. It should be within a bubble around the aircraft, but that’s obviously not the case.
Where that comes from is a different story. Why is it giving a value of that, where is it coming from, and why isn’t it depicted? Does it change with camera orientation?
I can almost guarantee that there is no 6000m flight visibility modeled or forecast at your altitude, outside of clouds and precip. So something else is triggering it and they’ve made an aesthetic choice not to depict it.
