Still no historical weather options for MSFS?

[jjf]

Hello, 

I think MSFS is a great sim, but the one thing I do find lacking is a historical weather option. Since I live in Australia, with MSFS I have to do all my northern hemisphere flying in the middle of the night if I want to use live weather in MSFS. I can’t work out a way to use live weather in a historical way like Active Sky does. 
 

AFAIK Active sky isn’t an option at this time for MSFS is it?

Lack of historical weather as an option really puts me off using MSFS.

[Cognita]

Yes, there is no possibility for historical weather in MSFS and from recent comments it does not seem to be a feature that will be added soon. It this is really important to you, which I can completely understand, you are best to stay with P3D or X-Plane, where Active Sky can give you that option.

[Orlaam]

While I think it's ridiculous they won't let 3rd party developers integrate in the sim for better Wx radar and all that AS gives you, I think the historical bit is less in demand.  I could be wrong.  I would appreciate more cloud variety (e.g., cirrus) and better weather radar.  The wind shifts are better now, but even the turbulence is inaccurate (e.i., not in clouds or over mountain ranges). 

Looking at the features people seem to have voted for on that Navigraph survey, it seems weather was low on the list.  Will see if 2024 brings any real changes to the day-to-day modeling, not silly tornadoes or uncommon events they have showcased.  In the meantime, I tend to look for weather conditions I'm interested in by looking on maps.  If I want rain and low visibility, then I pick a part of the world where that is happening.  With Navigraph charts you can go nearly anywhere, so it works out.  No sense in limiting yourself to one country.  Just roll the time back to daytime if you want light.

[vgbaron]

It's not a  perfect solution, and I have the same gripe as you, but what I do is 1) run Active Sky and get the historical weather, then create custom weather in MSFS that approximates the AS report. Itr;s definitely NOT perfect but it can be a nice substitute. Takes a bit of experimenting but it's acceptable to me.

 

[Radpreemo63]

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding things here, but you can use live weather and just change the time so you're flying in the daytime.

[Mace]

20 minutes ago, Radpreemo63 said:

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding things here, but you can use live weather and just change the time so you're flying in the daytime.

Arrrrrgh.  Here we go again

Yes but you're flying in nighttime weather, i.e. cooler temps, less vis etc.

[vbazillio]

For the record:

• WishList on official forum: https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/historic-weather-as-second-timeline/213758
• Transcript Live Dev Q/A Nov'23 Jorg's statement on historical weather: https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/november-dev-stream-2023-transcription/619372#historic-weather-21

Quote

So, I don’t think this is going to come soon, unfortunately

Although I'm in love with the MSFS Weather for my VFR flights, on the other hand I miss my ActiveSky 🙂

Edited December 29, 2023 by vbazillio

[orchestra_nl]

I miss historical weather too but enjoy the sim too much to revert to another sim.

Historical weather is important for those who:

• Pause the sim during flight for longer than a few minutes
• Fly at another time of day than realtime
• Fly in another season
• Want to refly a specific situation.

[jcomm]

Regarding the OP, I really don't understand his problem?

Weather reports are made based on UTC, so, no matter where you are on the Globe, and at what time of you local clock you want to start your simulation, you will get Real World Weather, because the reference is UTC after all...

Now, @orchestra_nl just posted above, the only circumstances where Historic weather is missed are those he enumerated, and in those cases I do indeed miss Historic Weather, like for instance when I am at work, or far from my home desktop sim and am aware of weather situations which I would like to see reproduced in the sim, but can't because when I arrive home unless I manually define the situation, at all levels 😕 and without the possibility of correctly representing aloft temperatures and high / low temp effects on barometric pressure, I will not be able to reproduce those conditions...  It's there that I surely miss Active Sky .... and that happens too regarding some details of coherency in weather depiction and effects that I had with AS in P3D...

[guenseli]

Come on guys, do we need to discuss the reasons for the need of historical weather again and again.

There are countless threads where you have long lists with enough reasons that historical weather is really important for a serious sim!

 

Again:

1. simply put the slider to daytime will not work: night weather is different to day weather!
2. during winter - if I take it seriously - I can't do any VFR flights (except on weeksends) as I have to work during day (otherwise point 1 rules)
3. Coming home, I want to recreate the nice foggy approaches we had this days morning. Can't do that, fog is over at afternoon
4. Was in holiday some weeks before: want to recreate these flights when I'm back home
5. There's a nice/challenging/interesting weather condition I want to train with various aircrafts over and over
6. using time acceleration over the ocean: you have at one point the wrong weather
7. sim pausing for some time (weather can easily change in that time; you encouter that problem when you unpause your flight now. With HW you can follow without issues)
8. Bored of winter? Want to fly during summer time?
9. Want to challenge that nice storm you had last autumn?

and so on ...

[vadriver]

I can only guess none of you have spotted the "inaccuracy" of historical weather ..... by all providers ... when compared with "live/current" particularly in FAA FIR's,

[guenseli]

Even when it's slightly off it's better then nothing. 

All a question of what data is stored. 

 

 

[Rimshot]

5 hours ago, jcomm said:

Regarding the OP, I really don't understand his problem?

Weather reports are made based on UTC, so, no matter where you are on the Globe, and at what time of you local clock you want to start your simulation, you will get Real World Weather, because the reference is UTC after all...

Because of another unfortunate shortcoming in MSFS, namely ATIS and ATC only reading out QNH in Hg, I prefer to fly in the US (where this readout is accurate). I live in the Netherlands. If I do a flight at 10.00 AM (Dutch time) I also want the flight to take place at 10.00 AM (US simulated). MSFS will then load the weather with the timestamp 9.00 UTC, right? Let's say I want to depart from a field somewhere near San Francisco. This will then give me 9.00 UTC weather, but at 9.00 UTC the local time around San Francisco is 1.00 AM. I'm therefor stuck with nighttime weather during my 10.00 AM simulated flight.

It has been explained many times before, but somehow the above argument doesn't seem to stick 😏

[knich]

I am frankly surprised this is not requested more given the number of simmers who clamor for realism.  Historic weather is realism; yet, they scoff at those who request it. 

[jcomm]

14 minutes ago, Rimshot said:

Because of another unfortunate shortcoming in MSFS, namely ATIS and ATC only reading out QNH in Hg, I prefer to fly in the US (where this readout is accurate). I live in the Netherlands. If I do a flight at 10.00 AM (Dutch time) I also want the flight to take place at 10.00 AM (US simulated). MSFS will then load the weather with the timestamp 9.00 UTC, right? Let's say I want to depart from a field somewhere near San Francisco. This will then give me 9.00 UTC weather, but at 9.00 UTC the local time around San Francisco is 1.00 AM. I'm therefor stuck with nighttime weather during my 10.00 AM simulated flight.

It has been explained many times before, but somehow the above argument doesn't seem to stick 😏

I see !