How acurate is the downloaded weather in ActiveSky 2012?

[fly60 0]

Yesterday in the general area where I live (North East NSW Australia) we had a significant weather event of heavy continous rain with high winds. However all I could get from ActiveSky 2012 was broken clouds up to 7000 ft, with NO presipitation recorded. I mean it was buckiting down outside with rain all day and yet AS2012 could not get it.Why? Have I done something wrong? Am I missing something?Yes I do have the Automatic Downloads ticked off in the Wx Options and I get the green message stating that weather has been downloaded.Thanks

Edited January 26, 2012 by fly60

[OzWhitey 3,353]

I tried port hedland during cyclone heidi two weeks back. Precipitation was often missing though winds were there. The other problem was that clouds were only in a small radius round the local weather station, no evidence of anything big like a cyclone.Whilst i may be missing a setting somewhere (im sure theres a tick box for hurricanes, and i ticked it, so its not that) - i wonder if oz weather is not as accurate as US?

[fly60 0]

There is no mention in the manual that US weather is anymore accurate then Australian weather or anywhere else for that matter. My Wx Report for YBNA has not changed much for the last few days, still at Broken clouds and no presipitation recorded. Yet my weather website has recorded over 220mm of rain in the last 5 days.Wonder if anyone else is experiencing such descrepancies.Cheers

[jbinner 15]

Is it possible that the METAR for the local station is not updating? WHat is the the METAR date and time stamp inside the AS2012 program? If the METAR is old, then you will see old WX. :(

[gbalean 0]

There shouldn't be an issue with METARs not updating. METARs are simply too few and far between to create an adequate representation of global weather. This is obviously why I haven't received a response to my thread asking for more information on a related topic (http://forum.avsim.net/topic/360716-accuracy-of-winds-aloft/). Despite being in the weather business for years, it seems both AS2012 and REX haven't picked the correct sources to base their weather models off. Unlike REX, Activesky is apparently using the NOAA's free GFS grib data for winds aloft, yet these discrepancies in weather on continents other than the US seem to suggest they are not bothering to extract cloud and precipitation data from the same or similar data sources. Surely Activesky should be using a combination of all sources to create the best representation. Until then, it's going to be pouring down rain in Australia, or in oceanic airspace where there are no METARs, and Activesky won't show any significant weather due to interpolation between ground based observations that are few and far between. Quite disappointing.

[fly60 0]

I was under the impression that METAR is updated automaticly !!Thanks Geoff for your imput, that is very interesting what you said.So the question I guess is REX or ActiveSky

[OzWhitey 3,353]

The metars do update automatically.As proposed above, i think its an interpolation problem. Where i live it's 200km between weather stations (that's south - actually east would be more like 1000km and west would be somewhere in africa i guess!).So my impression is that the interpolation sysem works quite well in the us, but falls over a bit in areas with low population density.

[Tenpin 3]

Let me ask, for my own knowledge, what are your weather settings in the FSX weather configruation utility for using the 2012 program?

[fly60 0]

Here is my weather settings in FSX

Edited January 30, 2012 by fly60