Hello,

Been playing a bit more lately and enjoying the sim after a somewhat long pause 🙊 but there is a little thing that i just don't like about the weather / season, it's the snow.

Sure that problem will go away by itself in a few days/weeks but, for now, even if i change the date in the sim, most of the time on locations where there is snow in winter i end up with tons of snow everywhere, you can't even see the runway (even when it snows the runway is usually cleared withing hours of the snow stopping, at least in my region).

2 weeks ago i did a test to LSZA (Lugano Switzerland) and even part of the lake was covered with snow, that just never happens, not to mention that Lugano hasn't seen an inch of snow for the last 3 months and you would not find any residue of snow there even if you looked everywhere with a microscope 😜

Sure it's a sim and it can't be 100% accurate but I find a bit annoying to be forced to fly with snow just because the real date is december/january/february/march, if i change the date in the sim to July i should at least get a somewhat realistic 'not-snowy' result. Right now, set the date to July, you still have lots of snow (try Colorado for example).

So it is what it is and probably ok for most people, but i just wondering if some addons would be able to improve that (weather force / rex season / bijan season ?). Maybe with those season packs you can force the sim to be in summer and get rid of the snow ? I don't have much idea on how those addons works. Thank you 🍻

Edited March 11, 20224 yr by Bad_T
added little pic to illustrate :)

MSFS weather/seasons is a mess/not really implemented. Snow coverage should go by this map:

https://www.meteoblue.com/en/weather/maps/#coords=10.75/46.0052/8.9386&map=snowDepth~hourly~auto~sfc~none

According to this Lugano should not have any snow coverage, only on the mountains to the north east.

They are working on better season implementation, for now we have to live with what we have..... 

This is a major problem and I am quite sad this issue is still persistent 1,5 YEARS after release 😞

Everyone annoyed by this big issue pls vote on this thread over at the official FS forum: https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/get-rid-of-the-snow-on-runways-taxiways-aprons-and-roads/339131/108

 

You basically just can not use the sim when there's snow coverage. This is quite hard for someone who wants to enjoy all the top notch airport addons that are available for Scandinavia, USA, Canada, Austria, Switzerland but just can't.

13 hours ago, Bad_T said:

Hello,

Been playing a bit more lately and enjoying the sim after a somewhat long pause 🙊 but there is a little thing that i just don't like about the weather / season, it's the snow.

Sure that problem will go away by itself in a few days/weeks but, for now, even if i change the date in the sim, most of the time on locations where there is snow in winter i end up with tons of snow everywhere, you can't even see the runway (even when it snows the runway is usually cleared withing hours of the snow stopping, at least in my region).

2 weeks ago i did a test to LSZA (Lugano Switzerland) and even part of the lake was covered with snow, that just never happens, not to mention that Lugano hasn't seen an inch of snow for the last 3 months and you would not find any residue of snow there even if you looked everywhere with a microscope 😜

Sure it's a sim and it can't be 100% accurate but I find a bit annoying to be forced to fly with snow just because the real date is december/january/february/march, if i change the date in the sim to July i should at least get a somewhat realistic 'not-snowy' result. Right now, set the date to July, you still have lots of snow (try Colorado for example).

So it is what it is and probably ok for most people, but i just wondering if some addons would be able to improve that (weather force / rex season / bijan season ?). Maybe with those season packs you can force the sim to be in summer and get rid of the snow ? I don't have much idea on how those addons works. Thank you 🍻

Not quite sure why you expect "LIVE" weather to give you weather of july when you choose the month of july. What data should this july weather be made upon? If you want to fly in July without snow, choose a summerly preset.
Now I understand you just wanted the real live weather outside without snow,but that means the live data needs to be worked on; your solution however is a non-solution.

Edited March 11, 20224 yr by Fiorentoni

It is really off.  I've flown right over small airports looking for the runway and only been able to find them on GPS.  The problem is that the system doesn't factor in melting but also simply plowing.  The only time you'd see roads and everything obscured is in the middle of a big storm. 

At the very least, roads, runways and taxiways should be clear most of the time unless it is actually snowing hard at the moment (or it that's too complicated, just leave them clear).  Even small airports in snowy areas are going to have some sort of snow plow.  Where I live we had 18 inches of snow in 6 hours this year (rates of 3-4 inches per hour at one point at the airport).  Even then I bet the airport wasn't that obscured for long. 

thanks for your inputs guys, appreciated 👍

Thanks for the map @Silicus, interesting.

@Fiorentoni yeah i understand what you say, but well 'real weather' is not really 'real' as you can see on the pic. I hoped it would be possible to use 'live weather' (meaning winds, cloud coverage, temperature) but that the sim would still honore the season and not show snow if you select another date in the sim (sure a temparature of -2 wouldn't be realistic in July but i wouldn't care about that, i would fly in winter weather since there is no way ot have historical weather in msfs, but with ground textures from another season just to not see all that unrealistic snow). Maybe this way of thinking is just based on my experience on p3d where i would never see snow on ground when choosing a summer month even though i was always using real live weather (activesky). It's very personal for sure and i understand it might not make much sense for some.

But yeah MSFS is a different beast, the weather representation can be fantastic for sure, but as @Konterhalbe and @kerosene31 said, for now, it looks like we are forced to use the sim in a deep snow environment in a lot of places from november to end of march unless we use some fixed preset which i have never done because random weather is a must for me. Hopefully all this will be improved sooner or later, for now, winter is almost over in the northern hemisphere so we will should be free of that crazy snow covering everything soon 😋

Thanks again 🥂

Edited March 11, 20224 yr by Bad_T
spelling

9 minutes ago, Bad_T said:

The thing is that i thought it would be possible to use 'live weather' (meaning winds, cloud coverage, temperature) but that the sim would still honore the season and not show snow if you select another date in the sim. Maybe this way of thinking is just based on my experience on p3d where i would never see snow when choosing a summer month even though i was always using real live weather (activesky).

In P3D the snow is “baked in” to the textures, based on the time set in the sim. Here is upstate New York, it would always show snow on the ground for any in-sim date from December through early March, no matter what the actual r/w snow cover might be.

In MSFS, there is no historical weather. With Live Weather active, you get the weather conditions for the current day and Zulu time for any given location, no matter what day or time you set in the sim.

Apparently there are issues with snow cover in MSFS for some r/w locations, but I have found that (in general) snow cover here in the eastern US typically matches the MeteoBlue snow cover map quite closely. Back in mid January we had a heavy snow storm that dropped up to two feet of snow in the northeast and upper midwest. That snow persisted for several weeks, and it was shown in the sim in the correct locations even in subsequent days when the weather was clear. About a week after the storm I did a flight from Houston to Detroit on a day when the entire eastern US was cloud free. Looking at a visual satellite photo it showed the existing snow cover began just south of Indianapolis, and that was very accurately shown in MSFS as I flew over KIND heading north. By the time I arrived at KDTW, the snow cover was solid - both in r/w and in MSFS.

The snow covered runways and taxiways are a definite problem that needs to be addressed by Asobo. For those that own Bijan’s season add-on, he includes an experimental snow mask that mostly fixes the problem, but it does it by changing all airport surfaces to a dark texture which prevents snow from showing. The drawback is that airport runways and ramps that should be depicted as light colored concrete are shown as dark asphalt, and the mask can obscure painted lines and markings.

Right now, my local airport in upstate New York is snow free, but we are expecting up to a foot of new snow from a storm which will begin late tonight and continue into Saturday. I will be curious if the new snow cover will be shown in Live Weather after the storm is over.

 

 

 

4 hours ago, Konterhalbe said:

This is a major problem and I am quite sad this issue is still persistent 1,5 YEARS after release 😞

Everyone annoyed by this big issue pls vote on this thread over at the official FS forum: https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/get-rid-of-the-snow-on-runways-taxiways-aprons-and-roads/339131/108

 

You basically just can not use the sim when there's snow coverage. This is quite hard for someone who wants to enjoy all the top notch airport addons that are available for Scandinavia, USA, Canada, Austria, Switzerland but just can't.

 

So frustrated!

 

Where's the word not allowed Season's ABOSO promised were second on their priority list at release after VR implementation...!

On 3/11/2022 at 9:50 AM, JRBarrett said:

Right now, my local airport in upstate New York is snow free, but we are expecting up to a foot of new snow from a storm which will begin late tonight and continue into Saturday. I will be curious if the new snow cover will be shown in Live Weather after the storm is over.

So we had about 5 inches of snow yesterday. It was clear of all snow (correctly) on Friday in update New York in the sim. The snow is correctly depicted today (Sunday) in MSFS. I flew south and the snow cover on the terrain ended around the Pennsylvania/Maryland border, which corresponds to today’s visible weather satellite photo, so the MeteoBlue snow cover depiction is working correctly in the northeastern US.