Why are CB's dangerous ? are they the ones having a lot water or what ?

 

It's not the water content, it's the powerful updrafts and downdrafts generated within the storm. It can cause a plane to suddenly gain altitude very rapidly, then fall just as rapidly. That can be disastrous for small planes if the forces are strong enough to exceed the strength of the airframe. It can even cause upsets with airliners flying at high altitudes if the situation isn't recognized and recovered in time. That's why the general rule is... don't go there. Duck around, or over the top, if you can (and the latter can be dangerous). 

 

X-Plane doesn't model any of this, because all winds are horizontal in the three layers we're given, except for the localized updraft near mountain ridges. And that's not really weather-related wind, more a special effect in the flight model tied to terrain proximity.

 

Whether or not X-Plane *needs* to model CB dynamics is a legitimate question, since pilots are supposed to avoid these things. And it would probably have to be a rough guess with generic airflow patterns and thunderhead location, because you can't get info on actual CB's from a METAR. It's not fine-grained enough. But even a rough best guess by the sim would be better than what we have now. 

 

At any rate, I think we'll see better modeling for all this eventually in X-Plane, because vertical air movement -- updrafts, downdrafts, turbulence -- occur outside of CB's as well, due to various factors of terrain and cloud formation. It would make the experience of flying through all kinds of weather more realistic than dealing only with horizontal winds.

 

What is the cost of this product?

What is the cost of this product?

 

39,99 Euros, which is almost $60 Canadian at today's exchange rate.

 

Since cross-platform use holds no appeal for me (I'm a pretty devout ASN user), I really only see a few things that appeal to me about this product at this time.  I'm rather undecided; it might have to mature a bit before I'm on board for that much.

Yikes that's pricey - I guess I'll stick with NOAA WX and its cloud popping

I was fortunate in having already bought FSGRW a few years back for FSX. Like RC4 it's nice to get some extra use out of these older investments that I was frankly no longer using!

I was fortunate in having already bought FSGRW a few years back for FSX. Like RC4 it's nice to get some extra use out of these older investments that I was frankly no longer using!

 

Yep, if you had bought it for FSX, then it would sure be a great development - getting use out of something bought for a different platform a couple of years ago suddenly becoming relevant, that doesn't happen too often!

 

Unfortunately, other than smoothing the weather transitions, it just doesn't look like this really changes a whole lot yet in what is visualized inside XP from what I've seen.  Nothing like when you compare stock weather to 3rd party weather in FSX, which can be drastically improved.

 

The only thing that at this point that might tempt me is that I fly around and out of CYEG a lot since I live nearby, and the NOAA plugin picks up a proper METAR at one end of the airport, and a blank or very lacking METAR at the other end, so if I dare to circle the airport, I can get weather popping in and out half a dozen times.  The method used to smooth the weather in FSGRW would likely cure that issue perfectly.

 

 

The only thing that at this point that might tempt me is that I fly around and out of CYEG a lot since I live nearby, and the NOAA plugin picks up a proper METAR at one end of the airport, and a blank or very lacking METAR at the other end, so if I dare to circle the airport, I can get weather popping in and out half a dozen times.  The method used to smooth the weather in FSGRW would likely cure that issue perfectly.

 

this is exactly why I purchased it:) 

Icing, turbulence, fast up/ down drafts, lightning strikes, windshear.

 

Thanks for the info

One of the major problems is still the absence of a proper correspondence between the types of water meteors associated with depressionary systems and storms, and what is rendered in X-Plane.

 

Murmur has mentioned there being practically no vertical development, so characteristic of convective systems in real life.

 

This makes rather different the way weather is depicted between, say, FSX and X-Plane. In some areas XP does a better job, but in most of the part the good old MSFS engine and some of the available injectors can paint much more convincing skies around us.

 

Then, while in the first versions of XP10 Austin had programmed turbuklence near every cloud base, sometimes very intense, this feature was considerably ironed out. Now, with FSRWxPro I can get some reasonable turbulence near clouds, but FSGlobal doesn't generate it most of the time.

In theory X-Plane could have a big advantage, thanks to the way in which the flight model works, in that an external weather add-on could simply write to the local wind velocity components datarefs (provided the flight model is accurate, but that is still another issue) to yield versatile and realistic turbulence effects. The problem is that the local wind components datarefs are currently read only.

One feature I found interesting in FS Global RW was the calculation of moist at the various levels, based on the relationship T/ Td.

 

I don't know if FS Global uses that data to populate the skies with clouds at levels not reported by the nearby METAR stations, but using humidity as one of the weather simulation variables is something that very few products take into account.

 

But, as you mentioned Murmur, not having direct access to those variables is complex, although Austin once gave a justification for that I believe...

I think Xplane creates the first layer of clouds almost perfect including turbulence. IMO Fs9 / fsx / p3d excels at those high clouds which are big monstrous and dangerous. 

One feature I found interesting in FS Global RW was the calculation of moist at the various levels, based on the relationship T/ Td.

 

I don't know if FS Global uses that data to populate the skies with clouds at levels not reported by the nearby METAR stations, but using humidity as one of the weather simulation variables is something that very few products take into account.

I believe that both FSGRW and ASN use data from the NOAA GFS computer model to determine upper winds, and both also use "other data".

 

Since both ASN and FSG use a server-based system to provide weather data to clients, the exact methods are a "trade secret", but I do know that there is a wealth of information that can be extracted from the GFS model to predict locations of fronts, cloud types and altitudes, precipitation etc.

 

Opus also gets its upper wind data from the NOAA GFS GRIBs - but unlike ASN and FSGRW, Opus clients connect directly to the NOAA servers to extract the GRIB data, which is parsed by the client on the local machine. I think that Opus is also making use of the T /Td data, if not more.

 

I hope that in future iterations of XP, that further improvements will be made in the weather engine - more wind levels - better support for true CB cloud types etc.

update is out :

from their facebook site :

 

 

"We have just released build 031 which brings the following improvements:

.) The connection stability when working with X-Plane was improved.

The new build can be obtained via the built in autoupdate function or from our website"