17 minutes ago, Drumcode said:

Not a big fan of scrolling this little back button of G1000

???  It is one of the larger knobs, LOL!

Weather in sim has been very accurate for me lately. I usually check Windy dot Com and check the winds at different altitudes, as well as precipitation and clouds, and it's always very close to what's reported.

I just did a flight out of Concrete WA heading East into the Cascades , the Live WX was spot on ;  rain and 43F . 
My only issue was there was no icing at all as I flew into falling snow .  I have my windshield effects on Ultra . 
Anybody else seeing this ? . 

On 11/5/2021 at 2:46 AM, jcomm said:

I really MISS Active Sky 😞

Man, I sure don't--it was fine for then but considering the entire sky where that app did its thing was so confined I'll happily take Live Weather even in its current state.  I've had so much more plausible weather even w/ stock Live Weather.   I care a little less about Live Weather exactly matching current conditions than I do having it in the ball park and offering the kind of clouds and atmospherics we already have, and this weather is Version 1.  When the Version 2 arrives I believe we will see a jump in quality and hopefully a little closer to RW conditions.

16 minutes ago, Noel said:

Man, I sure don't--it was fine for then but considering the entire sky where that app did its thing was so confined I'll happily take Live Weather even in its current state.  I've had so much more plausible weather even w/ stock Live Weather.   I care a little less about Live Weather exactly matching current conditions than I do having it in the ball park and offering the kind of clouds and atmospherics we already have, and this weather is Version 1.  When the Version 2 arrives I believe we will see a jump in quality and hopefully a little closer to RW conditions.

Got to be honest I miss ActiveSky massively in FS, one of the reasons that I go back to P3D. 

 

Don't get me wrong - the actual depiction of the weather I don't have a problem with, it's a massive improvement for me - flew into LFLB down to minimums and it was great. Even though it wasn't nearly as bad in real life, and leaving Heathrow the weather in the sim was clear, as opposed to foggy which it should have been.

 

What annoys me is the fact that it is impossible to query the weather at distance - so the likes of p2a has no clue what the weather in the sim is doing, I also kind of miss the option in AS which allows you to ensure you to set a max wind/min visibility (unfortunately it is rare that I have the time to divert or even go around).

 

That said I'll be looking forward to see what SU7 brings, and hopefully see the NG3 coming soon as well, although I'll probably be using both sims until the PMDG 777 comes out, which will be quite a while.

 

G

6 minutes ago, Gazzareth said:

Got to be honest I miss ActiveSky massively in FS, one of the reasons that I go back to P3D. 

+1 
However the past 7 days in MSFS has encouraged me.  Flying in the western third of USA.  Much better than even my recent experiences in the other two thirds of the country.  Now if MSFS would just jettison the excessive icing and thunder/lightening. 

2 hours ago, Gazzareth said:

hat annoys me is the fact that it is impossible to query the weather at distance - so the likes of p2a has no clue what the weather in the sim is doing,

Yes this is a very big deficit but is one so easily solved--it's just not been addressed yet.   Hopefully Asobo will get to it w/ their purported 'impressive' update to weather.  For now the work around I use is to bring up NOAA ground wind speed in LittleNavMap, and 8 out of 10 times it will align with what ATC will directs me to, and of course you can do that as far out as desired.  Here's what I proposed which is really nothing for Asobo to build but clearly they just haven't gotten around to it yet.  Borrowed from ActiveSky and I see it only got 22 votes:

https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/use-a-weather-request-pop-up-panel-like-this-to-view-destination-weather-winds-aloft-etc/439822

 

N/M.  Redundant post.

 

 

Edited November 7, 20214 yr by irocx

Flew SoCal again tonight and the sim was not doing a great job....  Lots of 4-5 miles in HZ depicted basically everywhere west of Burbank and sim was clear in a million.  Argh....  ups and downs people!

2 hours ago, Noel said:

Yes this is a very big deficit but is one so easily solved--it's just not been addressed yet.   Hopefully Asobo will get to it w/ their purported 'impressive' update to weather.  For now the work around I use is to bring up NOAA ground wind speed in LittleNavMap, and 8 out of 10 times it will align with what ATC will directs me to, and of course you can do that as far out as desired.  Here's what I proposed which is really nothing for Asobo to build but clearly they just haven't gotten around to it yet.  Borrowed from ActiveSky and I see it only got 22 votes:

If they do indeed start importing clouds, precip and visibility into the sim from r/w METAR, (to go along with the existing wind, temperature and pressure which already come from METAR), then indeed it is “easily solved” - they would simply import the text METAR for any local or distant airport and display it. Or, you could just go to any of dozens of online sites that can display current METAR by entering an airport identifier, with the expectation those conditions will be displayed in the sim for the airport in question.

But, in the current system, extracting weather information for a distant airport strictly from the MeteoBlue model would literally be impossible. The developers explained exactly why in one of the Q&As from a month or so back.

MSFS does not load the weather forecast model for the entire world. The model data is far too big for that - (many gigabytes in size). Instead, it loads weather for a certain radius around the aircraft’s current position. They did not say exactly how far the weather extends, but I would think it is probably no more than 150-200 miles tops. With a system based solely on a gridded model (without METAR), there would be no easy way to extract data from the model for an airport that is hundreds or thousands of miles away.

Meteorology is a long-time hobby of mine. I have software which can download model output files directly from the NCEP (National Centers for Environmental Prediction), and use them to created weather maps and charts for surface and aloft. I just checked the GRIB data files for the entire worldwide run of the latest NOAA GFS model for 1200Z today, and it is over 60 GB in size for the entire package - and that is before the files are decompressed. Granted, that is a higher resolution model than the NEMS Global product that MSFS uses, but knowing how gridded numeric weather models work, I can understand why the model-based LiveWeather system (without METAR) cannot give you weather reports for a distant location - (either surface or aloft).

Now, the software I use to analyze weather models (Unidata IDV), can easily extract data from the GFS (or other) models for any specific geographic location, and give a wealth of data for both surface and aloft, but this software is designed specifically for detailed meteological analysis and forecasting. It is a large and very complex application. I can see no way that Asobo could (or would) build that kind of functionality into MSFS. 

But, extracting and displaying surface METAR reports within the sim would indeed be “child’s play”, and hopefully this feature will be coming with SU7 and future updates, along with an improvement to the accuracy of ATIS/AWOS in-game.

Edited November 7, 20214 yr by JRBarrett

7 minutes ago, ryanbatcund said:

Flew SoCal again tonight and the sim was not doing a great job....  Lots of 4-5 miles in HZ depicted basically everywhere west of Burbank and sim was clear in a million.  Argh....  ups and downs people!

I just spawned at KLAX a few minutes ago on runway 24. I can see the marine layer cloud deck offshore, and Live Weather does show some scattered clouds drifting over the airport, but visibility looking inland is basically unlimited, while those airports that are still clear of clouds (KBUR, KONT, KSLI) are all currently reporting 5 miles in haze.

I am really hoping that there will be a significant improvement in how MSFS depicts visibility in SU7 to go along with the additional METAR data, but I guess we won’t know until the update actually arrives. 

I wasn't aware of the fact that local weather was being fetched from forecast data 😕  Always thought they were also fetching METAR / SPECI for each station, at least in the vicinity of the flight path and at lower levels / altitudes. That's how it's done for ages in Active Sky, and  then injected into the compatible sims, and although I've read about REX for MFS and thought it was totally useless, now I think differently - if it really tries to inject local METAR data - that being possible given limited SDK...

There are surely solutions for long haul flights that for instance Aerowinx PSX uses, like the "corridor" approach, where the model weather along the route + diversion are fetched from the OFP, including any SIGMET is merged with METAR.

Using forecasts for the local data is rather basic / "short-sighted"..... Where I work we use mostly ECMWF, and run some local models for islands and to better characterize some areas of mainland territory, but if I try to use the last run to simulate local METAR data, most of the time while not that far from reality, it's still out regarding important stuff like QNH, and clouds with their bases bellow MSA 😕

I did read they're bringing an update with SU7 (?) and METAR will now also be fetched for you flight. Don't know if only origin / destination or other points provided they're crossed at lower altitudes ?

This way of doing things is now typical of MFS to me. They blend apparently complex stuff with basic nonsense... / incompletness ... They hyped geopotential height being simulated, we found how weird/ broken it was and apparently they disabled it - at least my tests no longer reveal any non-ISA pressure gradients due to temperature...

Speaking of Temperature, I still get puzzled by how very few simulators REALLY take T and Td ( dewpoint ) to fine tune some depiction details. Actually as far as I've been able to experiment, only FlightGear with it's "Advanced" weather  model and Consorsoaring take it into consideration. ELITE IFT / XTS also takes it into account for soe aspects of the weather effects simulation ( although graphically from the early last century 🙂 ).

Edited November 7, 20214 yr by jcomm

9 hours ago, JRBarrett said:

But, in the current system, extracting weather information for a distant airport strictly from the MeteoBlue model would literally be impossible

I see what you're saying.  Do we know what the radius around the current plane position is?  Getting weather information from say 100-120m out would be dandy at least for me.  Right now I will tune ATIS but it does not become active until about 60-70m out, so right about the same time ATC gives arrival instructions but I'd rather be able to get it farther out is all and a simple popup in-sim I'll take over using another piece of software to get the same information.

1 hour ago, Noel said:

I see what you're saying.  Do we know what the radius around the current plane position is?  Getting weather information from say 100-120m out would be dandy at least for me.  Right now I will tune ATIS but it does not become active until about 60-70m out, so right about the same time ATC gives arrival instructions but I'd rather be able to get it farther out is all and a simple popup in-sim I'll take over using another piece of software to get the same information.

Not sure of the radius. I suspect the MetroBlue model weather is injected out to least as far as one can see at high altitude with unlimited visibility which would be about 150 miles. I have never seen (in MSFS) a situation where a distant bank of clouds suddenly “appears out of nowhere”, which often happens in X-Plane or even occasionally in FSX/P3D with ActiveSky.

If indeed the “new” Live Weather is going to be injecting all standard METAR parameters for airports, then hopefully there will be an option to enter any airport identifier and get the latest METAR report that the game is actually using for that location. If that feature is added, it would probably be part of the weather drop down menu.

Real ATIS transmissions are not very high-powered. Our company pilots have said that the AWOS for our local airport can be received out to about 70-80 miles when the aircraft is above 20,000 feet. Beyond that it gets too weak and noisy to understand. 

There is a limited subset of radio frequencies in the 118-136 MHz aviation radio band that can be used for ATIS/AWOS, so any given frequency will be assigned to many different airports. I assume they try to assign channels to avoid overlap where two different transmissions might interfere with each other, which is probably another reason why ATIS/AWOS uses less transmitter power than regular ATC 2-way voice channels. 

I was flying over North Carolina in MSFS with my COM radio set to 122.80, which is normally used for UNICOM at uncontrolled airports. I started picking up ATIS for a certain airport, and thought it might be a bug. But, when I looked up the airport info in Foreflight, it turned out that it did in fact use 122.80 for the automated weather broadcast.

Edited November 7, 20214 yr by JRBarrett