Seemingly like the live weather itself, snow coverage in MSFS is also more accurate in Europe. Maybe it is just a side effect of using a service (MeteoBlue) that is not based in the USA.

Edited January 21, 20242 yr by KERNEL32

1 hour ago, Farlis said:

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.

not pointless to me.  When I'm on the approach I'd rather fly thru snow then have no precip.  (When there is supposed to be).  One of the few things I miss from p3d.  But I do agree with you that I'd like accurate snow depths.  In my opinion, going with meteoblue and at the same time not opening up the weather API to 3rd Party devs was a huge blunder by asobo.  

38 minutes ago, micstatic said:

When I'm on the approach I'd rather fly thru snow then have no precip

Are we thinking about two separate issues here? Are you saying that when it should be snowing there is no precipitation? This is different than the representation of snow depth on the ground.  I cannot think of a time I flew into an airport reporting snow and did not have snow in the sim; and this past week with all the storms in the north east and Vancouver I experienced this a number of times. I am sure it happens but I am not sure how wide-spread that is. Snow depth representation is far ahead of P3D, with or without Active Sky; I really don't recall it having any ability to represent snow depth at all -- it just whitewashed everything on some day in November. I have really found MSFS does a pretty good job at this; it is not perfect, and some times it has certainly been off, but I can appreciate the difficulties of trying to do this. 

The opening up of weather to third-party developers is a difficult matter that I just do not feel able to assess. This comes down to some foundational architectural decisions that for now I still give ASOBO the benefit of the doubt, that it was just not practical to do this given the architecture.

yes.  Right two different issues.  I have certainly had areas I've flown into reporting snow but not in the sim.  I truly appreciate MSFS how it shows snow depth, and agree p3d did not do that.  However it's a real bummer to land somewhere in alaska in the summer and have it showing snow at the airport when there is not any snow there.  that's all.  

In 2 flights in the last couple of days the weather in my area of the mid to NE portion of the US has been faithfully depicted via Live Weather (including snow flurries).  However, only one area had any ground snow cover.  The rest, which should have represented around 3" of snow was non-existent.

I will say that in the one small area that showed snow cover, it was more realistic than what I've seen in the past.  Snow was coming down but the ground was not covered 100% - there were patches of snow (which is what you would see early-on under snowing conditions) with green areas between and some areas with snow and grass was poking through.  I was pleasantly surprised.