XP12 Clouds and Weather

[coastaldriver 920]

It seems there may have been some minor tweaking done to the XP12 weather engine and clouds (not announced in the updates?) but something has changed. Accuracy pretty spot on for winds, cloud and coverage etc. Cloud shapes and images seem to also have picked up. I have done 3 flights, same aircraft same time depature and same flight plan which is from Isafadjor to Reykyavik in the Piper Aerostar700P. Now a confession I have not completed any flight for reasons of having crashed in the Reykyavik area (1 Ran out of Fuel 2 Loss of control in severe turbulence on descent 3 Severe icing leading to stall and spin at 9 nm). So ok I acknowledge that the PA700P is not the plane for the job or Iceland weather at the moment. 

Anyhow the weather forecast was for Broken at 3500ft with reduced vis at Isafadjor Cloud broken to F120 broken above. Wind 230 to 240 57 to 65 knots. Snowshowers and icing! Reykyavik basically broken at about 6000 in layers to about 2000ft vis reduced in precip. Temperatures minus at any level. This is basically and closely what I got in the sim on the flights. The turbulence was severe, icing was severe and the only clear air was at F120 but still occasional moderate turbulence. (I noted that the GPS unit laminar default is not allowing for wind on tracking - confirmed by NDB relative bearings and compared against the track depicted on the GPS map display) The inbuilt map (now I have found how to see terrain hint - change it to VFR) also was accurate and wind depiction on the laminar map was also reasonably accurate. So what did I see and how did the aircraft respond to the weather being generated in the sim. 

The calm before the storm on the ground ready to go at.Isafadjor  the airport lies at the end of narrow fjord the edges are mountain ranges over 2500ft down to the water level. Basically you go out of there back up the fjord into a large clear water area at right angles to the fjord turn right and climb like heck to get above lsalt of 6500 ft. Pick up another NDB another 20 nm along track then head south to BIRK. Sounds simple sort of. )There is a good video about on Youtube showing an Icelandic F50 approach into Isafadjor - well worth a look this is a very challenging approach and departure back out. The departure had to be towards the end of the fjord or high terrain because of the wind which was greater than 30 knots on the ground from the SSW. 

Safely out and on the way

Comfy at FL120

Now the ride out was wild with severe turbulence which you basically fly into climbing out of the fjord and trying to gain altitude. The cloud depiction looked pretty spot on to me . Not sure what others get but this is very good IMHO

 

Edited February 7, 2023 by coastaldriver
typo

[coastaldriver 920]

Last couple of screenshots illustrating the cloud depicted in the sim. 

So it seems something has changed or working better. The weather accuracy was pretty well correct and the cloud depiction fine by me. 

Not so good the icing issue - you could see it happening, the performance degrading but with heat and boots on it was still not enough to get away with flight in Iceland in these conditions, not in an Aerostar anyways. 

[coastaldriver 920]

Here is the video nothing smooth happening here for those guys!

 

[MrBitstFlyer 3,875]

Wow, thanks for these screenshots and video! What a fantastic approach into that airport!  I think you are right, there does seem to be improvements to the weather not seen in release notes.

[coastaldriver 920]

Yep this one of a handful of what I call those most challenging instrument approaches in the world. Well worth anybody simming to take the effort to have a crack at. They are not in order of difficulty:

Queenstown New Zealand - VOR Approach

Isafadjor - NDB (Note this is what is called a cloud break procedure - your last fix takes you down to the minima well out of the fjord but ready to hang a left and do the rest visually.

Akuyeriki - ILS this is doglegged VOR to VOR to finally pick up the ILS via, back to back or twin VOR tracking down through the hills. Again extremely challenging approach.

Pukhara in Nepal.

I am sure there a quite a few more elsewhere!

 

Edited February 7, 2023 by coastaldriver
typo

[jcomm 5,939]

WSIL31 BICC 070824
BIRD SIGMET U02 VALID 070900/071100 BIRK-
BIRD REYKJAVIK CTA SEV TURB FCST WI N6730 W01440 - N6420 W01145 -
N6310 W01835 - N6640 W02130 - N6730 W01440 SFC/FL100 MOV NE 50KT
WKN=

[UKflyer 630]

XP11/Xenviro seems to be the only one with accurate weather at the moment, MSFS has dodgy servers and XP12 doesn't do low visibility in metars

Edited February 7, 2023 by UKflyer

[jcomm 5,939]

44 minutes ago, UKflyer said:

XP11/Xenviro seems to be the only one with accurate weather at the moment, MSFS has dodgy servers and XP12 doesn't do low visibility in metars

The weather servers used for xp12s weather are good, but the algorithms used for the merge between forecast (NOAA) and METAR still need some fine tuning...

Edited February 7, 2023 by cagarini

[UKflyer 630]

32 minutes ago, cagarini said:

The weather servers used for xp12s weather are good, but the algorithms used for the merge between forecast (NOAA) and METAR still need some fine tuning...

yeh no fog showing in MSFS/XP12 this morning even though it was bad at most airports in UK, xenviro had it spot on

i'm sure LR will get it sorted eventually

Edited February 7, 2023 by UKflyer

[Franz007 491]

The "visibility" is still completely off, otherwise it has been quite good with the pressure, temperature and cloud-coverage. But the horizontal visibility is not matching at all what the metars says and i hope they can tune that in future too.

[coastaldriver 920]

12 hours ago, cagarini said:

WSIL31 BICC 070824
BIRD SIGMET U02 VALID 070900/071100 BIRK-
BIRD REYKJAVIK CTA SEV TURB FCST WI N6730 W01440 - N6420 W01145 -
N6310 W01835 - N6640 W02130 - N6730 W01440 SFC/FL100 MOV NE 50KT
WKN=

Yep that it was -severe! Nothing pleasant or fun about flying in the sim or for real in that sort of weather! 😓

[coastaldriver 920]

4 hours ago, Franz007 said:

The "visibility" is still completely off, otherwise it has been quite good with the pressure, temperature and cloud-coverage. But the horizontal visibility is not matching at all what the metars says and i hope they can tune that in future too.

Franz this has been the case with all the sims for varous reason. I guess part of the reason is the way Met people report visibility for real - they report the average for the whole sky dome but it could be in one or two sectors only and the rest is fine, the only Metars that fine tune this are the ones that report runway visual range (basically only major international airports). Same with cloud they could be reporting CAVOK but you could have overcast above at 6000 ft. 

[mSparks 2,086]

8 hours ago, coastaldriver said:

Franz this has been the case with all the sims for varous reason. I guess part of the reason is the way Met people report visibility for real - they report the average for the whole sky dome but it could be in one or two sectors only and the rest is fine, the only Metars that fine tune this are the ones that report runway visual range (basically only major international airports). Same with cloud they could be reporting CAVOK but you could have overcast above at 6000 ft. 

Its because current area conditions are in the TAF not the METAR, and they arent using TAFs.

I ran into exactly this problem when I made the first iterations of

https://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/files/file/43863-balkan-area-detailed-flight-planner/

And flew the plans "real world".

An upscaled global version of that is already "hot" on the autoatc ai server testing branch, XP12 weather API is incoming.

It will get better, just going to take time to get through resolving "more important issues". 

Use instructor station if you want to fly in specific conditions:

 

Edited February 8, 2023 by mSparks

[jcomm 5,939]

10 hours ago, coastaldriver said:

Franz this has been the case with all the sims for varous reason. I guess part of the reason is the way Met people report visibility for real - they report the average for the whole sky dome but it could be in one or two sectors only and the rest is fine, the only Metars that fine tune this are the ones that report runway visual range (basically only major international airports). Same with cloud they could be reporting CAVOK but you could have overcast above at 6000 ft. 

Indeed METAR code can be made to report specific directions or runway visibility, very useful in situations where some runways are temporarily free from a bank of fog or any other type of visibility obstruction.

This is how you read a METAR (metar-taf.com)

It's surely very difficult for a general purpose flight simulator like XP12 or MFS to be able to accurately represent such situations though.

Yesterday night after making sure my XP12 had updated to the latest beta build 0.3-r1, I decided to give it a go, and to also try a fresh new Mosquito freeware release. The weather around LPPT, at LPMT, LPAR and LPST, reported different cloud covers, ranging between FEW and SCT, and in XP12 it was what I had rendered. The pressure, temperature and winds were also in agreement with the corresponding METARs. 

I don't know if this update was supposed to fix something with the weather, or if something Server-side changed, but it was ok.

Edited February 8, 2023 by cagarini

[coastaldriver 920]

All good news mSparks, I guess when realism was not that important you could get away with approximation not any more with XP12 (and MSFS I guess). Building a better sim has meant 'Building a better Sim". 

Cagarini - agree nothing in the release notes but something has shifted or changed. 

Now if they could just get rid of the streaming rain above F200!!