Hi,

 

Since historic weather is a make-or-break issue for me, I've been holding off on Opus for a while now until there's more than 24 hours of historic weather (a year would be fine though!). But after yet another disappointing flight using ActiveSky that ended up with wrong weather depiction at my destination I'm reconsidering...

 

I understand that METARs can be downloaded and used later by Opus. If I wanted to start assembling my own historic archive of weather, how feasible would that be? What kind of files are we talking about and, more importantly, how much storage space per day (for the whole world as covered by Opus) would that require?

 

I may as well also ask: are there any plans in the pipeline to expand the length of time of historic weather that is archived centrally?

 

Best,

James

But after yet another disappointing flight using ActiveSky that ended up with wrong weather depiction at my destination I'm reconsidering...

 

It was one of these situations that got me looking at OpusFSX a few months ago. Opus was still pretty primitive at the time, but has constantly improved. At some point I may go ahead and buy it, but I'm not at that point yet.

 

It turns out that AS2012 DWC had a few problems, which appear to be bugs which will eventually be fixed. I started using Smooth Cloud Transitions and registered FSUIPC to do wind/baro/temp smoothing which works fairly well and I'm getting what I expect most of the time.

 

One thing I noticed during a few test flights was a small patch of low lying stratus clouds, indicating ground fog, about 20 miles from the nearest METAR. There was another larger area at 35-40 miles. I also saw some in the distance off my flight path. I'm wondering if Opus could produce the same effect.

 

I recently did a flight in a DC-3 in Alaska with the historical weather (and FSX date) set to June 1 so I'd have enough daylight to complete the flight from Sitka to Dutch Harbor (pretty much the entire Alaska southern coast) while getting reasonable summer Alaska weather. A lot of the flight was over areas with no close METAR stations, but the weather was reasonable the whole flight, which is a hard thing for a weather program to do. There were lots of areas of clouds out over the ocean where there is obviously no METAR coverage, even if I was flying under clear skies on the coast.

 

it would be nice if Opus could give us historical weather from pretty much any time we want (you're right, a year would be good), and inject interesting and reasonable random weather in areas without METAR coverage like the clouds over the ocean or the ground fog described above.

 

Gotta love Opus' winds aloft report though. It was the absence of any kind of wind aloft reporting that got me to switch from FSX built-in weather to ASX in the first place, and Active Sky does not give that kind of information in-game.

 

Hook

We are planning to extend the historic period to 36 hours but no longer than that at the moment. If you want to create own interesting weather scenarios for future use then you can do it two ways, saving the current weather as a theme or importing your own METARs.

 

To create your own theme fly to some interesting weather and save the current dynamic weather as a named theme using the option within the Weather dialog. You can then subsequently load this theme anywhere in the world.

 

Importing your own METARs just involves creating a text file with the METARs of interest and then using the Import METAR file option within the Weather dialog, METAR date/times are ignored. In addition you may just specify one global METAR (using ICAO code GLOB) which means that METAR will be used globally, anywhere you wish to fly in the world.

 

Regards

Cheryl