CLR means at least partially automatically generated weather. SKC is the same but indicating a human generated report.

But that doesn't means, that the clouds could not have been above 12k AGL and therefore the CLR message although clouds were visible.

 

Regards

Hirschi

 

I believe we are agreeing with each other. SKC may be more recent than my experience (see my About Me in my profile). In my experience CLR was in the definitions twice. It was there once for manned stations and another for unmanned, or partially unmanned (per above). In the case of unmanned, yes, no clouds reported below 12,000. But for a manned report CLR meant clear. i.e. less than 1/10th coverage.

 

I was stationed mostly at an Army Airfield (AAF). While there we transitioned from a 24/7 manned wx station to one that was manned 16 hours and automated/unmanned 8 hours. I do not recall SKC unless it was in the comments.

Yeah, my roots belong to military radar (GCI), nice to see another "off router"

Ok, I didn't know that difference between CLR and SKC regarding cloud coverage. I thought the only difference between them is the kind of reporting source and both mean there're no clouds below 12k or 10k.

Our authorities knew it long before, the only way to keep it clear is colour coding clouds and visibility

 

Regards

Hirschi

The problem was, I saw a LOT of clouds in that direction while every station in that entire sector reported CLR. The clouds did not look close, maybe as much as 50 nm away, but that part of the sky was totally covered. I'm talking about covering an arc of 20 degrees, maybe more.

 

The only thing I can think of is that the actual clouds were over an area that didn't have a station. There are areas of sparse station coverage in that direction (east of Dallas).

 

Larry Hooikins

 

Larry. You are likely correct. Could it be that FSX default weather was not overridden by reported weather due to lack of proximity of reporting stations? Who knows. Over my last 15 years of sim flying I, have lived in So New Jersey, So Calif, and am now on the eastern shore of Maryland. All of those are more highly populated with reporting stations so I have not experienced the issue you reported. The density of reporting stations may indeed be the key. As a participant in virtual airlines I have completed a lot of long cross country flights. From takeoff until overflight of sparsely populated areas there was plenty of time for weather to load and reload. Would be interesting to see if you can duplicate the experience. If you can, would be interesting to see if it makes any difference when you configure the weather. i.e. from the FSX start screen vs. loading weather from the top menu once FSX is fully loaded and ready to fly. Weather can be loaded both ways.

Could it be that FSX default weather was not overridden by reported weather due to lack of proximity of reporting stations?

 

I never got as far as loading FSX. Once I saw that all the weather stations were reporting CLR, and there were no clouds depicted on the AS2012 map, I gave up. Active Sky may have injected random clouds, but these are usually reported in the AS2012 METARs as few or scattered and I didn't see any there.

 

AS2012 is pretty good about injecting the correct weather, so I wouldn't have expected FSX to be any different from the map. Also, I wasn't prepared to fly as far as Houston at 80 knots to check.

 

Hook