To my surprise today, no snow (winter textures) in Washington DC area although it received 20 inches yesterday. Snow line began north of Philidelphia. I've got GEPro/REX/UT USA and AS6.5 for FS9. Question is: what determines snow on ground? Second, I'm considering purchasing megascenery mid-atlantic which has winter textures; again, what determines whether there are winter textures or not? Does the date have to be later than 21 Dec?THanks!Rich Perry

To my surprise today, no snow (winter textures) in Washington DC area although it received 20 inches yesterday. Snow line began north of Philidelphia. I've got GEPro/REX/UT USA and AS6.5 for FS9. Question is: what determines snow on ground? Second, I'm considering purchasing megascenery mid-atlantic which has winter textures; again, what determines whether there are winter textures or not? Does the date have to be later than 21 Dec?THanks!Rich Perry

It all has to do with the date how far south winter textures will go. Now if you were flying into DC while it was snowing you'll find plenty of snow on the ground but after that it will go away until the proper date comes up in FS where it's programed that snow is a constant feature in that area for the time of year.

There is a freeware addon in the library that alters the default snow map to a more realistic representation of North America by Scott Smart called North American Winter Season replacement, the file name is nam_seasons.zip. However I have not used this file so try it out for yourself and see how it goes.

FS9 has a file, seasons.bgl with world-wide coverage. The file contains 12 separate "maps", each one is in effect roughly from 19th of one month to 18th of the next. (In FSX it was changed to the 1st of the month). So with a single file, the textures will only change once a month on or about the 18th. The file works sort of like a landclass file, in that the world is broken into square tiles and a value 0-4 assigned to each, defined as spring, summer, fall, winter, hard winter (snow). Unfortunately in FS9, each tile is fairly large (IIRC in the range of 4-5km on a side) so you can't really have patchy snow, such as on the top of a mountain (there is a "snow" landclass, but that would be year-round snow).There's no easy way around the FS9 limitation, though in theory you could create different files, with different snow coverage, and swap them in and out, like one might do with weather-influenced textures.For the northern hemisphere, the US NOAA National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) produces coverage maps which last time I looked were uploaded to a free server about 3-5 days behind real time. Those maps are what I used to create a modified seasons.bgl. I took the NSIDC data for one day a month.For scenery objects, it is possible to read day-of-year from fs9, and have the object display a texture based on the date.scott s..