Historical weather is absolutely a must

[vadriver 248]

Historic weather should be a must as many have said above, more so if you fly east west away from your local meridian.

It however needs to be more comprehensively recorded than what AS currently does ........ hourly snapshots of the latest metar etc. to match the USA records. Most jurisdictions record half hourly & often specis in addition which are not. One often sees contradictions with the TAF because of this.

Server storage of such data seems to be the issue, & more so as time passes. Maybe one of the "weather developers" will provide users with software to store such data on a user's drive for later read by their depiction application. ..... sounds simple if one sees what data AWC for example can provide worldwide.

For now, I'll continue flying north south about my local meridian with current weather (in P3D)

[Dominique_K 10,152]

There is no opposition between real time and historical weather. This is because I always fly real weather - I don’t care for presets -  that I want a weather history over 24 h.

This is a logical feature of a simulator which pretends to cover the whole world. When at 16:00 in France, I fly in Japan where it is 23:00 , I want to fly in daylight with the proper daylight weather and not the night weather. Only those who restrict themselves to their home turf don’t need it. And those who don’t care anyway.

I do not underestimate the difficulty to do it with Aosobo/MeteoBlue weather engine, But it would be highly desirable that they stop to play stupid in Redmont saying they don’t understand why we want  it.

 

[Georgleboui 28]

Historic weather is important for a sim that really encourages to go out and explore the world.

Recently I've been flying around northern Africa, which visually is stunning. But it's really odd taking off mid-day from the middle of a desert and it's 10 degrees C, because I'm 12 hours away timezone-wise and it's night when its day for me if I use real-time.

I'm sure that even just doing 6 hour and 12 hour snapshots of weather rather than granular would be fine.

 

[guenseli 1,606]

13 minutes ago, vadriver said:

Server storage of such data seems to be the issue,

Don't think, Microsoft would have problems with server storage 😉

 

We had this pointless discussion already. Similar to why some people want system deepth aircraft, others can't understand that. 

 

The point to not want to have it is just one: MS shouldn't "waste" development on such a feature

Points to have that feature:

- training similar situations over and over (certain winds or visibilities)
- flying in certain conditions which are not present the complete day (think about fog in the morning in autumn)
- flying in other regions with different timezones (weather IS different at night, even if you can change to daylight)
- during winter with short daytime, normal "workers" could hardly do a VFR flight or any flight in daylight
- you can recreate real flights (e.g. your last holiday flight)
- You fly with time acceleration (long haul), therefore you have to start your flight in the past or you will end in the future 😉
- save/pause flights and continue them with the same weather condition you saved them

 

But doesn't count what we want or not, as long as MS is not interested

[JBDB-MD80 1,489]

2 hours ago, guenseli said:

But doesn't count what we want or not, as long as MS is not interested

Leave we out of it its more of a I want feature Nothing spectacular or game changer, there are already applications that have these features utilize them.

Edited June 21, 2023 by JBDB-MD80
Spelling

[SierraHotel 989]

10 hours ago, cepact said:

I stopped flight simming because of lack of historical weather in MSFS.

This feature was the one that provided me the most joy previously in P3D with ActiveSky

Being able to fly any route at any time, being able to accelerate the simulator and the weather would follow up.

Now I'm restricted to fly only with the real time, and without sim acceleration. Otherwise weather won't match time of the day. If I accelerate a long flight I may end up with daytime weather during night and vice versa. Imagine you arrive at a location during the middle of the night with typical summer daytime temperatures such as 90 °F and with lots of wind while it should be calm. It's unacceptable.

"Historical weather is absolutely a must"

 

Why?

[Daube 360]

25 minutes ago, SierraHotel said:

"Historical weather is absolutely a must"

 

Why?

You want to know why ? Here is why, with a simple example:

Last weekend I wanted to fly in the famous Death Valley in USA with real weather. I wanted to see how hot this place can be, and how planes fly in there. Death Valley is famous for its unbelievably high temperatures right ?

After setting up my flight, and adjusting the time to day time, I launched my flight and was surprised by the temperature, which was only barely above 20°C. I guess Death Valley is not that deadly after all, just typical american marketing, right ? 🙂

 

 

... Or maybe, because I'm not in the american timezone, when I launched my flight it was nighttime in the DeathValley, and the "Real Weather" was showing just that, despite the fact that I had set the local time to 02:00pm. And that's the limitation we are complaining about right there. With historical weather, I would have been able to set the flight to 02:00pm the day before, and I would have gotten the actual HOT temperatures expected for that place at that time.

And I don't even need to go exotic places. Most of the times, I can only fly in the evening, after dinner. If I want to fly in my local area, the real weather would give me only the current night weather, not the day-time weather, which is completely different. People who can't understand such a basic principle (or people who say 'why don't you set the weather manually') are probably not really interested in real weather anyways.

[djbully 210]

I feel like we’re flogging a dead horse here, but yes historical weather is essential for me and the way I use the sim. So much so that I’ve gone back to p3d. 
 

This has been requested multiple times, but just seems to fall on deaf ears! 

[MarcG 3,035]

1 hour ago, SierraHotel said:

"Historical weather is absolutely a must"

 

Why?

For people that want to use it... obviously 🙄

[GGLurch 10]

On this topic - does anybody know if a simple METAR/WX Preset Converter is available somewhere?

E.g. there is a little software called METAR (by spectrun), generating presets out of METAR information, downloaded based on provided ICAO/IATA airport codes.

I would rather like to use historic METAR codes (e.g. copy/paste a METAR code directly) which are available from varius web-sites and generate a corresponding preset. That preset then also automatically sets date & time as coded in the METAR itself. 

GG

[Juliett Alfa Romeo 561]

I hope to see news on this subject for MSFS24. Who knows...

 

[Fiorentoni 4,407]

10 hours ago, jrw4 said:

They do? Here in Florida it's mostly in the afternoon. And fog elsewhere often happens at night.

Since no one other than a few folks at Asobo know how the weather system actually works, it's kind of hard for us to know how to fix it. We think in terms of the old-style weather depiction systems in which weather is painted locally by the flight sim software and a local weather app in response to a dataset of downloaded METARs. So all you need have is historic METAR data to generate a display of the "weather".

But I'm guessing that this is not the case for MSFS, which may well create a global weather scenario in the cloud, and it is this depiction which is downloaded to users depending on where they are above the Earth. If that's the case, it may be a very, very long wait for historic weather or a weather API for that matter.

Well at the end of the day the live weather in MSFS is created by a data input from Meteoblue. It is being fed data and then creates its own global weather simulation, combined with Metar input. So for historical weather it would only need Meteoblue and Metar data input from let's say yesterday. There's nothing specifically different between live weather and yesterdays weather.

I think what's actually the "problem" is that Meteoblue does not save that data yet and/or it would be a huge additional cost for Microsoft to buy into that historical data, and probably not worth it profit-wise considering that 90% of the simmers will do VFR flights with live weather. So it's a financial question after all and it's the reason why they will never do it.

ActiveSky was completely different in that regard because it created only local weather with Metars and interpolation. This would be impossible to do combined with MSFS global weather approach, so all that's left is - once Asobo opens the API - the traditional local weather approach, which is already used by Rex Weatherforce in MSFS.

[tup61 1,641]

In P3D I ONLY flew with historical weather. Most of my flying is done in the evening but I don't like to fly with evening conditions and weather all the time. I also like to fly at various times at various places around the world with appropriate weather. I love to fly in Norway but after flying over Norway covered in show for months I'd love to fly over it with summer conditions and appropriate weather every now and then. I'd like to pick a day from another season with the correct weather or even pick a certain day BECAUSE of the weather that specific day.

But well, it's no use telling why I would LOVE to see historic weather because the ones who want it too already know why and the ones who don't care about itdon't have a clue and never will. 😉

Having said that: I will NOT stop using MSFS because of this!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! So to me it clearly is not a must but it IS near the top of my wish list.

[GSalden 4,701]

Myself I only fly realtime + real weather + live traffic ,so I need the current weather.

‘ Real weather for President “ 

🥳

 

( no problem If historical weather would exist in MSFS though..)

Edited June 21, 2023 by GSalden

[Cognita 1,114]

3 hours ago, Fiorentoni said:

ActiveSky was completely different in that regard because it created only local weather with Metars and interpolation. This would be impossible to do combined with MSFS global weather approach, so all that's left is - once Asobo opens the API - the traditional local weather approach, which is already used by Rex Weatherforce in MSFS.

I think that is a good summary of the challenge and you point to a possible solution, an option to use Asobo's global weather model or turn it off and be able to select another provider's weather. That provider would have access to weather fields as was the case in P3D and could have a program that downloads and populates those fields. It would be localized weather like in previous programs and you would lose access to Asobo's dynamic weather model. Given what we know of the weather system, this is the only approach I can think of that would work around the complexity of storing, processing and streaming multiple copies of the global weather model.