Yesterday , on a couple flights the winds at destination were completely off. Out of 5 or so flights 3 had winds at destination almost 180 degrees off. I use the PMDG NGX, Aivlasoft EFB reporting noaa weather observations. I am using the 2.28.5 beta with default weather settings (transition altitude 60,000 and recovery at 0) . I also checked the "relax wind smoothing box" in the weather dialog with the same results. For instance flying into KMCI , the reported wind was 175 @ 11, yet on decent and landing and even on the ground I was getting 334@9, almost the exact opposite. Once on the ground if you open the weather dialog and simply hit "ok" everything reverts to normal. The same happened approaching KTPA later, reported winds out of the northeast and instead they were out of the south in the sim. I normally fly airliners so I am a little confused on the wind smoothing features and which ones are optimal. I purchased OPUS with the current official release and have never had the ill fated "swirling winds" with complex aircraft, so I am more concerned about inaccurate winds in the sim especially at destination.

 

Eric

How often are you updating the weather? We do disable the weather update below 2000 ft on decent, perhaps we could think about relaxing that.

 

Regards

Cheryl

I use the default 20 mins./60 km. also the atis report was wrong 60nm out above 10,000

Have you got wind smoothing and stabilisation enabled which you need to do if you are experiencing the infamous FSX winds aloft bug on your system. Most system do not experience problems so you can quite happily set the Transition Altitude to 60000 feet (disabling wind stabilisation) and the Relax Wind Smoothing option ticked which does exactl what it says. This is the default setting if you want real world weather, but a few systems cannt cope if flying high level.

 

If you do relax wind smoothing (now the default setting with beta 2.29.1) then you can even adjust the internal surface wind smoothing parameters by setting the max wind speed and directional changes. Set these to something like 30 knots and 180 degrees and you have effectively disabled all wind smoothing and the surface winds will keep track of all METAR variations. The rest is just down to getting a live weather update prior to descent and landing, and of course if you want to compare METARs then you should look at the METAR in OpusWeather.txt, this is the METAR report that wraps downloaded from NOAA.

 

You might be interested to know that the improved geodesic mapping in 2.29.1 gives a perfect synchronisation and mapping within FSX to well beyond 450km out from your aircraft's current position. All you have to do now is make sure you update the dynamic weather and away you go. Of course if your system suffers from wind shifts then you will have to compromise in some way, that means a mixture of smoothing and stabilisation to prevent FSX from going loopy.

 

Download 2.29.1, open your Weather dialog, click on the default buttons and adjust the max speed/directional limits to suit your tastes. If you wait a few weeks you will also be able to give the new Weather Smoothing option a try.

 

Regards

Stephen

 

I should have also mentioned, if you are landing at a site that has more than one METAR site within its 16km weather cell then these METARs are averaged to give you the actual meteorological conditions at your destination. At present, the weather cells are extended to 32km size for the winds.

 

Stephen

 

We have not yet implemented winds aloft and only simulate those at present but the remaining data should correspond with the ATIS unless it is averaged with nearby METARs. It sounds like you didn't happen to receive a METAR update prior to decent. You could configure a more frequent update time or manually force an update before decending below 2000 ft. We only disabled the weather update on decent to avoid sudden wind shift problems so we may provide an option to disable that now.

 

Regards

Cheryl

 

Just make sure you go by the METAR reports in OpusSoftware.txt file, not some other package. These are the METARs downloaded from NOAA that were actually used to generate and map the weather.

 

Also check your weather settings, you MUST relax the wind smoothing if you want accurate surface winds. If you don't relax the smoothing it is impossible for the LWE to keep in agreement with the METARs. Make sure you tick the 'Relax Surface Wind Smoothing' option in the weather dialog.

 

Stephen

thanks for the reply, i think i understand the tweaks better. Luckily I have not had too many issues with wind shifts since the last fix in FSUIPC. going to give 2.29 a go, thanks!