Seeing no snow on the ground flying around Philly.  Live weather is on.  Date set to today.  Is this just me?

Nope, Agreed for me as well. Nowhere in the northeast do I see snow. 

It is 150cm where I live in Sweden, both in the game and in real life. 🥶

I am seeing snow in the Pacific North West

Same. Snow on mountains but no ground cover snow at all....

2 hours ago, jjn47 said:

Seeing no snow on the ground flying around Philly.  Live weather is on.  Date set to today.  Is this just me?

Apart from the coverage being off depending on region, it is also important to notice that the coverage is probably also dependant on the 12 hour cycle of the forecast update within the sim and not real time within the hour of it falling.

When it snowed heavily on wednesday evening in my area I checked the sim the next morning to see if the snow had also fallen in the sim. It had not. The next time I came around to check the sim was another day later, and by that time the snow had shown up.

Edited January 21, 20242 yr by Farlis

This is the thing that kills me about MSFS.  It's been pointed out to them a million times.  They have received the message.  But they somehow are unwilling or unable to fix it. 

I've noticed there's a delay so if it's snowing IRL it doesn't show up in the MSFS until few hours later.

1 hour ago, YVR_23 said:

I've noticed there's a delay so if it's snowing IRL it doesn't show up in the MSFS until few hours later.

We've had snow on the ground for several days here in southeast Pennsylvania, but it still isn't showing up in the sim, at least on my computer.

Edited January 21, 20242 yr by jjn47

2 hours ago, micstatic said:

This is the thing that kills me about MSFS.  It's been pointed out to them a million times.  They have received the message.  But they somehow are unwilling or unable to fix it. 

This is World Update 19.1a beta "Global Warming" 🙂

First, I want to acknowledge how much better MSFS is than the old P3D, which simply turned on the snow cover on some day in the fall and turned it off in the spring. It was hopelessly unrealistic.

That said, trying to apply snow coverage is not at all easy. One challenge is described by Metro Blue itself, where MSFS is getting its data:

Quote

 

Snowfall amount and its related liquid equivalent precipitation amount are determined using a variety of different rain gauges. As a rule of thumb, 10 cm of fresh snowfall corresponds to 1 cm of water. As soon as snow settles on the surface, it is rapidly compressed by further snowflakes, so that typical snow covers have a density of factor 9 (powder snow) to 6 (wet snow) compared to water.

Snowfall accumulates on the surface, and can reach deposits of up to several meters in certain areas. The height of the snow cover is determined by:

1. amount of snowfall;
2. density of snow (usually as a function of flake structure, resulting from air temperature),
3. snowmelt;
4. hill slope (which reduces deposition area);
5. wind transport (which may move snow away and accumulate in certain other areas);
6. sliding effects;
7. compaction.
8. sunshine.

As a result of these factors, the depth of snow cover is very difficult to estimate, and can vary substantially within a few meters distance. Our meteogram SNOW shows an average accumulated snow depth within a grid cell.

 

Beyond these challenges, I am not sure that the snow coverage variable is not something Microsoft servers are downloaded constantly in real time. Maybe they download it once or twice a day, which would explain why it takes some time to show up in the sim. There are limits to how real we can make things. 

P3d with active sky was actually better with snow coverage by far than msfs. 

1 hour ago, micstatic said:

P3d with active sky was actually better with snow coverage by far than msfs. 

No it was not. Only with active snow fall. Accumulated snow would not show up at all.

Edited January 21, 20242 yr by Farlis

7 minutes ago, Farlis said:

No it was not. Only with active snow fall. Accumulated snow would not show up at all.

yes that's true.  But I consider accumulated snow a luxury at this point.  As a starting point, I'd take areas that are supposed to have snow not looking totally dry and vice versa.  

38 minutes ago, micstatic said:

yes that's true.  But I consider accumulated snow a luxury at this point.  As a starting point, I'd take areas that are supposed to have snow not looking totally dry and vice versa.  

But that's rather pointless. There is no guarantee that the snow will actually stick just because it is currently snowing. And if it does, it used to vanish in the older sims as soon as it stopped snowing.

I'd rather have a decent representation of current snow depths over a day, than having snow depicted on the ground just because it is currently snowing.