There have been no issues using weather Presets, and the Live Weather feature seems to work fairly well.  However, I've never been able to get the custom weather settings to work at all.

• Cloud heights are always wrong
• Winds are never what I entered
• There is no entry for BP

In the last test I set a specific wind direction so I could test a particular ILS only to have a tailwind and traffic landing in my face!

Basically what I've seen the duration of the sim (including alpha).  I know it works for some though.  What does sometimes work is getting into the sim, then setting clear skies (with the cloud popup icon top right), then setting live.  It takes a few seconds and weather should load in.  For me its never corresponded to the METAR but sometimes it's at least close-ish.

Over the past few months since first release it has appeared to me that the experience with weather varies significantly by region of the globe.  Same with navdata.

 

The way I do custom weather is save a new preset.

Note that if you work with the preset text files you can get options that are unavailable in the GUI.

If you have not already download these freeware weather presets, They will give you a head start on creating your own.

https://www.nexusmods.com/microsoftflightsimulator/mods/80

I've used the Clear weather preset followed by Live Weather once I've spawned to get a fairly accurate rendition of real-time weather.

But, what I'm trying to do here is set up approaches for practice and/or testing, so I need the winds to be appropriate for that approach.  I've never used a sim with a custom setting where the setting didn't work. I should be able to set cloud layers, bases, winds aloft, surface, etc. and have them appear.  In this case, I'm getting no match whatsoever.

I was hoping to find out whether this is an issue with my system/installation only or whether others had experienced it.

Just now, RandallR said:

I've used the Clear weather preset followed by Live Weather once I've spawned to get a fairly accurate rendition of real-time weather.

But, what I'm trying to do here is set up approaches for practice and/or testing, so I need the winds to be appropriate for that approach.  I've never used a sim with a custom setting where the setting didn't work. I should be able to set cloud layers, bases, winds aloft, surface, etc. and have them appear.  In this case, I'm getting no match whatsoever.

I was hoping to find out whether this is an issue with my system/installation only or whether others had experienced it.

Only suggestion I have is the order seems to matter.  Maybe try clicking on "Custom" and setting the weather and time inside the custom settings as the very last thing you do before hitting fly. am not on a PC with the game to check .

You can of course also pause the flight and change the weather settings at any time. 

Edited January 4, 20215 yr by Glenn Fitzpatrick

I would recommend you turn off Live Weather in Options first (in the Data section I think) and then create a flight with a preset thats close to what you want.  You can change all the things you mention in the in game weather dialog.  I don't know how faithfully the game will recreate your inputs but you do have some control.

The OP is saying that they are using the Custom Weather dialog, not live weather, and the sim is not properly reflecting what they choose in the dialog.

Having live weather on seems to interfere with custom weather.

I ran with custom weather only for quite a while.  Live weather wasn't working correctly in the US where I am and I was enjoying 'making my own clouds' as it were.  When I tried to go to 'Live Weather", I was surprised to find that to get it to work correctly you not only had to turn on Live Weather in the Data section of Options but in the flight planning menu there are three places where you also select 'Live Weather' and once I set all three of those (one on the bottom left, one on the drop down menu and one below the drop down menu) thats when Live weather started working and I just left it there.

Flight simulator always remembers your last weather settings and it will try to load those automatically and so if you have been flying on Live Weather, even if you choose a preset like clear sky or few clouds, it often still has the winds and temperatures from the live weather.

A lot of people complain that FS doesnt work right and in my opinion its in part due to Asobo having too many different ways to do the same thing and theres something wrong with the key messaging system imo.

Thanks, everyone, for your suggestions.  Here's what I've tried and discovered so far:

• Turned off Live data before flight-planning
• Went to the Custom Weather area and set clouds, surface winds, and BP (and why in the heck are settings listed in Celsius and hPa??!!!)
• After spawning, NONE of the weather settings were correct!
• I again set the weather from the drop down weather dialog and everything seemed to square away (except now there was no setting for BP)

First observations: Live Weather data being off in settings didn't help in the flight-planning area, though it may have helped using the in-sim dialog.

Now that I had the weather (for the most part) that I wanted, I took off and climbed to Cruise.  At Cruise level I experienced something new - the aircraft went into a continuous little "Dutch Roll" - it wouldn't stop.  Considering I had set very mild winds (2 knots at surface to mimic actual conditions today) I couldn't believe that such a low setting for the surface would generate such a nausea-inducing phenomenon at 10,000 ft. I dropped the weather dialog down and noticed that the system had created a "wind gusts" setting to go with my entry.  Looking at the MFD I found winds at 1-2 knots varying over 90 degrees several times a second!  Out of curiosity, I pulled the "gusts" amount and rate down to almost zero and bingo - the Dutch Roll stopped and the aircraft became stable.

So, note to self: always set several wind layers (not just surface) and reduce the gusts setting at altitude.

I would try creating your own presets, either by saving a modified one or copy and renaming an existing preset and editing the text file.

11 hours ago, RandallR said:

First observations: Live Weather data being off in settings didn't help in the flight-planning area, though it may have helped using the in-sim dialog.

When you restart the sim after turning Live weather off and choosing a preset, it wont try to load any live weather and you should be good to go from there.

FS has to be restarted for lots of things to work right.  Thats been my experience anyway.  Sometimes a complete machine reboot is needed/helpful.

keep trying - it'll work.

P.S.: I don't think Ive ever actually used the flight planner to change weather other than to choose a preset.  Its in game that I did all my changes and then I would save that and choose the saved file as the preset on a future flight.

P.S.2: As was mentioned above, you should be able to load a preset and make any small change and then save that as a new file and then edit the values in the text file to anything you want but always start with something close to what you want imo.

Edited January 5, 20215 yr by sightseer