Real world weather not representative of local conditions.

[sightseer 895]

For those who want/need certain conditions for practice purposes, is it not possible to create training missions?  Is weather not completely adjustable to your liking in a mission?

I havent even looked at the training section of the sim but thats where I would expect that kind of repetitive thing to be located. 

[jrw4 624]

Yes, one can set custom weather scenarios as needed, e.g., cloud layers, wind layers, temperatures, etc. Visibilities are a bit odd, as I recall that this involves setting an aerosol parameter.

[sightseer 895]

1 hour ago, jrw4 said:

one can set custom weather scenarios as needed,

I checked out the training section earlier and there doesnt appear to be any related to IFR flight.

I was thinking that maybe some enterprising person could create a whole set of IFR training missions with a wide variety of weather to practice in.  Maybe someone could figure out how to use real weather to create missions on the fly?

[eslader 1,783]

5 hours ago, Noel said:

I'm curious as to why that matters.

Why does any of this matter? We're pretending to fly fake airplanes. What's important to you is likely going to be different for others. 

As to why it matters to me, others have already said it. How am I supposed to plan for weather when the real world weather isn't accurately depicted in the sim and there's no way to find out what the sim's destination weather is until I get close enough to tune in ATIS? Or when I have no clue what the winds aloft are like until I'm actually flying in them? Kinda sucks to do a 6 hour flight and find out you can't land because the airport is socked in, and you've burned through your reserves because you didn't know about the 80kt headwind.

 

[RandallR 446]

I've noted that SimBrief provides a decent picture of winds aloft during the flight plan creation - very helpful.

[eslader 1,783]

SimBrief's weather is generated by real world weather reports. So we're back to the problem that the sim doesn't display real world weather, which means you can't reliably plan based on what SimBrief is telling you.

 

Edited May 5, 2021 by eslader

[cavaricooper 2,615]

On 5/3/2021 at 2:28 PM, sd_flyer said:

It's been like this from beginning of times. On the bright side Asobo aware of it and it's on the list of fixes

... and today's HF is supposed to address some issues in re. Wx as well... off to fly, fingers x'ed!

[fakeflyer737 992]

So i downloaded the HF today and flew the Carenado PA34 from YYG to YYT and the WX matched the METAR  almost perfectly! Go give it a try. Maybe i just got lucky but it was great.

[RandallR 446]

1 hour ago, eslader said:

SimBrief's weather is generated by real world weather reports. So we're back to the problem that the sim doesn't display real world weather, which means you can't reliably plan based on what SimBrief is telling you.

 

I agree that it doesn't always match, but the last 3 flights I've taken they've matched almost perfectly.  I planned my cruising altitudes based on SimBrief and they were very close in the sim.

[Noel 4,499]

1 hour ago, eslader said:

How am I supposed to plan for weather when the real world weather isn't accurately depicted in the sim and there's no way to find out what the sim's destination weather is until I get close enough to tune in ATIS?

I agree, and that's what I said.  The real deficiency is that you don't know what the weather will be far enough out, not that the weather doesn't match the real world.

[jrw4 624]

2 hours ago, eslader said:

Why does any of this matter? We're pretending to fly fake airplanes. What's important to you is likely going to be different for others. 

As to why it matters to me, others have already said it. How am I supposed to plan for weather when the real world weather isn't accurately depicted in the sim and there's no way to find out what the sim's destination weather is until I get close enough to tune in ATIS? Or when I have no clue what the winds aloft are like until I'm actually flying in them? Kinda sucks to do a 6 hour flight and find out you can't land because the airport is socked in, and you've burned through your reserves because you didn't know about the 80kt headwind.

 

Happens all the time in the real world even with actual winds aloft forecasts, etc. That why we have those two folks sitting at the pointy end of the plane, monitoring the flight's progress and selecting potential diversion airports as they go along. This is true even for single engine VFR, but perhaps even more so.

[eslader 1,783]

1 minute ago, jrw4 said:

Happens all the time in the real world even with actual winds aloft forecasts, etc.

Not to the degree it happens in MSFS.

And pilots can certainly know what's going on at the destination earlier than "I just got in range of ATIS."

 

Edited May 5, 2021 by eslader

[Noel 4,499]

3 hours ago, jrw4 said:

Happens all the time in the real world even with actual winds aloft forecasts, etc. That why we have those two folks sitting at the pointy end of the plane, monitoring the flight's progress and selecting potential diversion airports as they go along. This is true even for single engine VFR, but perhaps even more so.

 

5 hours ago, eslader said:

We're pretending to fly fake airplanes.

I'm not pretending I really am flying...fake airplanes 😉

[Noel 4,499]

This isn't related to this thread but I just discovered this so thought I'd pass it on there might be a few who never bothered to explore.  You can select the precipitation mask to display precip in case you're looking for this.  It was raining moderately in Nashville, now I'm about half way to KLGC about where precipitation density is presumably higher:

[JRBarrett 3,070]

14 hours ago, eslader said:

 

SimBrief's weather is generated by real world weather reports. So we're back to the problem that the sim doesn't display real world weather, which means you can't reliably plan based on what SimBrief is telling you.

 

Where winds aloft (specifically) are concerned, there is no such thing as “real world weather reports”. All winds aloft reports used in actual aviation flight planning come from predictive forecast models no different than what MeteoBlue provides in MSFS. Upper level winds (in the real world) are only directly sampled/measured every 12 hours by weather balloons and satellite observations which feed any one of several computer models. The model used for an official aviation weather briefing provided by the FAA will be the GFS - in Europe the model used will be the ECMWF. Canada also has their own government weather model, which will be the source used for a weather briefing there.

If a real world airline flight plan forecast from KJFK to KLAX shows that the “expected” upper winds over an enroute waypoint (example VHP VOR) at 34000 feet will be “253 at 92”, that does not mean that when the aircraft gets to that point, that is exactly what will be encountered - both the direction and velocity might differ.... sometimes slightly, sometimes by a greater amount. All r/w airline pilots are aware that the upper winds in their flight plan documents are predictions - not actual observations.

Simbrief uses the NOAA GFS forecast model for upper winds. Although there are often discrepancies between real world airport surface weather and the airport weather in MSFS because MSFS does not use the cloud and visibility parameters from METAR reports, I have found that the upper winds in MSFS are usually very close to the forecasts from other models like the GFS and ECMWF. The only time this is not the case is when the LiveWeather server gets stuck providing 3-day-old weather as happened two weeks ago. 

I absolutely agree that MSFS needs to have a function where you can retrieve the actual conditions set by LiveWeather for your destination airport before you arrive. You can, at least, use real world METARS to get the destination wind, and have the assurance that the destination wind will be the same because LiveWeather does indeed use real METAR reports for surface wind direction - so at least you can plan (in advance) for which runway you will be landing on. But, clouds, precipitation and visibility might be very different than what the current METAR shows.

Even current accurate METAR reports don’t always tell the whole story. My local airport is located in the lowest part of a valley, and in autumn, it is very subject to developing thick ground fog. The visibility can go from 10+ miles to zero in less than 15 minutes if the temperature drops a couple of degrees more than the TAF predicted. Our company aircraft have had to divert to alternate airports on more than one occasion because the “latest weather” report when they were 30 minutes from landing showed VFR, but when they got ready to begin the approach, it had changed to below minimums LIFR.

Edited May 6, 2021 by JRBarrett