Real world weather not representative of local conditions.

[Tierborn 188]

15 hours ago, cavaricooper said:

This is one of MSFS’ primary shortcomings. As long as it does not depict real weather accurately, including winds aloft, it cannot really be a whole world simulation. They are part and parcel of any location.

Asobo continues to dogmatically keep this bit closed off… so we are left in limbo. Metoblue is a RW aviation resource, but Asobo’s implementation is currently rubbish.

Fingers x’ed!

C

Except you can input the real weather yourself

[mattn 45]

Try Unreal Weather, it also injects METAR based weather like REX, but its free:

https://unrealweather.blogspot.com/

[Toneal2 6]

Last night I flew into Québec. CYQB. Meteoblue aviation suggested overcast but the whole flight was clear of cloud. METAR indicated clouds but the wind in the Sim roughly agreed with it. I have live traffic switched on but none showed. I wonder if some of the problems are related to the server.

[loge 42]

As a "casual" and fairly new simmer (I played FSX and early P3D versions a few years ago, but only really got back into it with MSFS), I'm interested to understand why many people consider accurate (as opposed to realistic / forecast) RW weather - in particular, closely matching the RW METAR at particular airports - to be a very important feature.  Is it because you fly on Vatsim, or use flight planning tools that use RW METARs as their weather inputs, or simply that you fly in your local area and like the weather to look the same as out of the window?

Just trying to understand more about how the more "serious" simmers on here fly using RW.  From my limited viewpoint, I think the weather depiction is absolutely stunning in MSFS - far more "realistic" looking than FSX with weather addons, which had abrupt weather transitions if I remember correctly - and it generally more-or-less matches what I see in Little Navmap (I don't use any other planning tools), if not quite accurate.  But appreciate there are other viewpoints, as this topic is often discussed.

[fppilot 4,353]

11 hours ago, WestAir said:

So can someone explain how ASOBO WX works?

It works with one chosen partner and it's for better or worse depending on where you live (server) and/or where you fly (region).  Seems to be affected by both.  It may not work exactly the same worldwide.  Just congecture based on observation of previous related topics here.

Edited May 4, 2021 by fppilot

[highflyer2020 607]

It's not always 100% accurate but I never got the deal with wanted it to be 100% matching with METAR reports for the local airport.

METAR is a snapshot and often just a localized picture of what the weather is whereas MS is using a weather engine to predict the weather at a very granular level.

The prediction is always going to be different & METAR is not exactly true to life anyway so not sure how one is better than the other.

[fppilot 4,353]

2 minutes ago, highflyer2020 said:

It's not always 100% accurate but I never got the deal with wanted it to be 100% matching with METAR reports for the local airport.

The prediction is always going to be different & METAR is not exactly true to life anyway so not sure how one is better than the other.

This is more a rhetorical queston.  Do you/did you ever fly in FSX, P3D or XP with Active Sky, REX, or FSGRW?

Edited May 4, 2021 by fppilot

[Glenn Fitzpatrick 3,798]

One of the issues is live weather only updates once a day in game.

There is a work around to get it to pull more current weather:

https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/bug-logged-live-weather-not-accurate-give-this-trick-a-try/397005/53

 

 

[sightseer 895]

1 hour ago, loge said:

I think the weather depiction is absolutely stunning in MSFS - far more "realistic" looking than FSX with weather addons, which had abrupt weather transitions if I remember correctly

I agree completely.  The new sims weather is really good and often quite accurate I think.  I love the 'no hard transitions' thing.  It even modelled a high winds thunderstorm at an airport in Florida that I tried to take off from not long ago... tried... my little Cessna got blown away!

[JRBarrett 3,048]

19 hours ago, cavaricooper said:

This is one of MSFS’ primary shortcomings. As long as it does not depict real weather accurately, including winds aloft, it cannot really be a whole world simulation. They are part and parcel of any location.

Asobo continues to dogmatically keep this bit closed off… so we are left in limbo. Metoblue is a RW aviation resource, but Asobo’s implementation is currently rubbish.

Fingers x’ed!

C

I have not seen any serious issues with the winds aloft implementation in Live Weather - the direction, velocity and temperatures at any given location typically match quite close to the NOAA GFS model - at least at higher altitudes. All winds aloft used in real world aviation come from forecast models - they are not based on real-time observations. If you obtain an official weather briefing from the US aviationweather.gov web site, the winds aloft forecast will come from the GFS model. In Europe, it will usually come from the ECMWF model.

The “favorable comparison” between the GFS and Live Weather winds aloft does depend on LW serving the model data for the correct day and time. When you have a situation like two weeks ago, where the Live Weather server was apparently locked up, and providing 3-day-old data, all bets are off.

Edited May 4, 2021 by JRBarrett

[JRBarrett 3,048]

38 minutes ago, Glenn Fitzpatrick said:

One of the issues is live weather only updates once a day in game.

There is a work around to get it to pull more current weather:

https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/bug-logged-live-weather-not-accurate-give-this-trick-a-try/397005/53

 

 

It is supposed to update twice each day. MeteoBlue generates a new forecast model every 12 hours, and the model package will contain forecast data for each grid point for 24 discrete hours, beginning at the model start time (either 0000Z or 1200Z). The problem appears to be that the 1200Z model run which MeteoBlue makes available to end users, (including Microsoft), between 1700Z and 1800Z, is not getting imported into the LiveWeather servers in a timely fashion more often than not.

[Cpt_Piett 4,541]

50 minutes ago, Glenn Fitzpatrick said:

One of the issues is live weather only updates once a day in game.

Whaat? Really? I’m not saying that I don’t believe that, it’s just first time I’ve heard of it. And of course it’s not good if it’s true.

[jrw4 624]

6 minutes ago, Cpt_Piett said:

Whaat? Really? I’m not saying that I don’t believe that, it’s just first time I’ve heard of it. And of course it’s not good if it’s true.

And I don't believe it either. 

Just to check, I went in to MSFS in the past hour and spawned the C172 at five or six US airports. At each location, I started with clear skies and then, went to the in-cockpit menu to open the weather window. I set the sim time to LIVE by clicking the corresponding button(this may be an important step that is easy to miss) and then selected Live Weather from the drop-down menu.

Having set up the weather I  powered up the default G1000 and set the altimeter to the local reading with the B key shortcut. Using a known bug in the G1000 I also displayed the local wind on the PFD using option 3 on the WIND menu.

So here is what I found. At none of the airports did the local pressure differ from the current METAR displayed on Skyvector by more the 0.02 in, and that was only in one case. The others were spot on. Similarly the displayed winds were almost identical to those reported in the official METAR. At two airports that were selected because of heavy rain rain being displayed on the Skyvector maps, heavy rain was observed, as was lightning. No lightning was seen at other airports. Sky conditions were consistent with those reported in the METAR, but I have no expectation that these would be exact matches.

I have no doubt that there are times when glitches might arise due to server configuration problems in the servers along the CDN chain of MSFS, but from the observations I made this morning, I also am pretty sure that the live weather system in MSFS is capable of providing sensible weather depiction within this extraordinary desktop sim. 

[cavaricooper 2,613]

Jim-

Respectfully, I must disagree. 

The weather I encounter often does not reflect NOAA METAR (or even Metoblue's website Wx for that matter).  I would agree with the fact that when GFS data matches aloft- it is acceptable. 

With the internet- there is no excuse for not pulling flight path METAR data every few minutes, and importing GFS data at the start of each flight and once an hour, that way when the modeled forecast changes, the Wx aloft  will as well- and not be 11 hours off.

This sim does so many things well, and quite a few not so well.  I keep hoping (against hope) that Asobo will work towards patching the holes in this leaking ship- BEFORE hoisting additional sail.  Hope springs eternal.

Best- C

Edited May 4, 2021 by cavaricooper

[jrw4 624]

I don't think we disagree at all. I have no doubt that there's something that causes some systems to display incorrectly, but it's not inherent in the design of the simulator per se. From what I have read, MSFS has pulled METAR data for local pressure, temperature, and wind speed for some time now, and my measurements suggest precisely that, at least for two of the three parameters. I should have looked harder at the G1000 to find the temperature.

Perhaps it would be useful for other users to try my simple experiment in order to help us understand better what's going on before suggesting solutions to problems that might or might not exist. The current sim can (but may not always) provide METAR based weather correctly. Now it would be good to figure out when and where it fails to do so.

Cheers.