12 hours ago, Baber20 said:

I have a question and a suggestion. If its raining in the distance, will you be able to see reduced visibility in that specific area ? Since xplane does not simulate visible rain shafts yet, this would be nice to have. 

That's not possible.

8 hours ago, jcomm said:

I have to reinforce that THIS IS SIMPLY THE BEST LUA Scrit I ever used with X-Plane !!!

Wow!, Wow!!!, WoW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I am aware similar plugins were made available in the past, but he way the AutoHaze plugin works is simply ASTOUNDING!

So far no impact in my Xp12 install, and I wasn't even using FlyWithLua anymore because I have opted for an almost plain vanilla install of Xp12.

Created the 2 API keys, and the necessary (free) accounts at the corresponding providers, and enjoying now the effects.

Best addon of the Year so far...

 

Make sure you also disable "AI-based" Smart App Control in Windowzeeeee... (at your responsibility, but I find it pretty much useless anyway...):

🔧 How to Disable Smart App Control in Windows 11

1. Open Windows Settings

Press Win + I

2. Go to Privacy & Security

In the left sidebar, select Privacy & security

3. Open Windows Security

Click Windows Security Then click Open Windows Security

4. Go to App & Browser Control

Select App & browser control

5. Open Smart App Control Settings

Click Smart App Control

6. Turn It Off

Choose Off Restart your PC to apply the change.

That sounds good. Thanks for the review! I failed when I tried to use it. First, I must be too stupid to understand the signification of all options lol and second I could not create an API-key via openweathermap. When I cliked on "Get API-key" it relinks me to a page "The page you’re looking for doesn’t exist or has been moved".

I am potentially very interested since I realized the haze is a huge issue, not necessarely the intensity but the very fast shifts we're facing: from excellent visibility to a thick layer of haze (back and forth), making us lose visual ground-contact in VFR-conditions... 

Edited April 21Apr 21 by Franz007

1 hour ago, Franz007 said:

That sounds good. Thanks for the review! I failed when I tried to use it. First, I must be too stupid to understand the signification of all options lol and second I could not create an API-key via openweathermap. When I cliked on "Get API-key" it relinks me to a page "The page you’re looking for doesn’t exist or has been moved".

It is not very intuitive, specially on the 2nd site - OpenWeatherMap.

After signing up for an account at each of the services, logged in into OpenWeatherMap and on the top menu bar where you have:

New Products   /  Services /  API keys .... click "API keys" and your key, ready to be cut & pasted is under Key, a string in a greyish window foreground. See it?

Then both keys go into the "AutoHaze-api-keys.txt" that the plugin creates in the Scripts folder, one per line.

Give it a try!

1 hour ago, Franz007 said:

from excellent visibility to a thick layer of haze (back and forth), making us lose visual ground-contact in VFR-conditions... 

I would consider that a bug worth logging with Laminar

 

1 hour ago, Franz007 said:

That sounds good. Thanks for the review! I failed when I tried to use it. First, I must be too stupid to understand the signification of all options lol and second I could not create an API-key via openweathermap. When I cliked on "Get API-key" it relinks me to a page "The page you’re looking for doesn’t exist or has been moved".

I am potentially very interested since I realized the haze is a huge issue, not necessarely the intensity but the very fast shifts we're facing: from excellent visibility to a thick layer of haze (back and forth), making us lose visual ground-contact in VFR-conditions... 

OpenWeatherMap is a backup to Visual Crossing only, so give it a go.

2 hours ago, peroni said:

I would consider that a bug worth logging with Laminar

 

Yeah, I mentionned it to them already and as far as I recall, they said it would not be changed because it was very difficult to do. I also think they will look at the weather again in the future when they are dbe with their actual roadmap. I will for sure give some feedbacks again when it will become a task again.

2 hours ago, jcomm said:

It is not very intuitive, specially on the 2nd site - OpenWeatherMap.

After signing up for an account at each of the services, logged in into OpenWeatherMap and on the top menu bar where you have:

New Products   /  Services /  API keys .... click "API keys" and your key, ready to be cut & pasted is under Key, a string in a greyish window foreground. See it?

Then both keys go into the "AutoHaze-api-keys.txt" that the plugin creates in the Scripts folder, one per line.

Give it a try!

Thank you for the explanations. I will try it tomorow when I’ll be back at my PC again 🙂

OK, so now I could enter my other API-key for OWM. I opened the window of the script and select the "LIVE"-register. What do I have to set there? I see a lot of options and sliders to change...I guess I have to check the box "Use CAMW aerosol data"? What about the ones for altitude fix? And what altitude to enter there? And do I have to check the box "override XP12 visibility"?

And at the there are two sliders for turbidity: if I check the boxes, it will be set automatically, is that correct?

Sorry to ask but I am a bit confused about all options. I wanted to test the automatic values coming from the API (Live).

Here my actual settings. Is that good? 🙂

I still see some very abrupt haze-changes, that are my main problem when doing VFR-flights...do any of you guys know why?

 

@MrBitstFlyer this is interesting, I've been looking into the "too much haze" reports and given you've experimented with the turbidity I'm going to have a question:

Have you experimented with manual weather by setting the visibility through the weather window? Do you think the manual weather depiction is correct? This is important to me because I want to confirm that the issue with haze is not an inaccuracy with the rendering but what's told to the renderer by the live weather.

Also I personally recommend only playing with the turbidity, both single_rat and multi_rat are already set to their physically correct values and they don't change depending on weather conditions. They also control the entire scattering intensity, not just aerosol scattering. Turbidity on the other hand controls aerosols only, which are what's responsible from the visibility.

The turbidity dataref defines the Linke turbidity of the atmosphere, aka the ratio between the vertical optical depth of an atmosphere with aerosols and the vertical optical depth of a clean atmosphere. Therefore a Linke turbidity of 1 means clean atmosphere, and aerosol density increases as the turbidity increases. The current table in the simulator that correlates visibility to the Linke turbidity are based on the OPAC dataset: https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/79/5/1520-0477_1998_079_0831_opoaac_2_0_co_2.xml

Edit: Looking at your code, you don't have to make a table for the AOD-turbidity conversion, they are directly convertible from one another. Ignoring the complication of water wapor levels, turbidity = (AOD + 0.1) / 0.1, where 0.1 is the approximate vertical optical depth of a clean atmosphere. So you can see that the equation is just the definition of Linke turbidity. Looking at the table, the values you used for turbidity are significantly lower than they should be - an aerosol optical depth of 0.1 corresponds to a turbidity of 2, while in your table it corresponds to a turbidity of 1.11, so it appears that you are overestimating the visibility. How did you calculate the values in the table?

Regardless very interesting work, using AOD data for turbidity is something no other Lua scripts I know does, this approach is definitely more physically correct.

Edited April 22Apr 22 by Maya2

2 hours ago, Maya2 said:

Regardless very interesting work, using AOD data for turbidity is something no other Lua scripts I know does.

Thank you so much for taking the time to provide such detailed and knowledgeable feedback. This is exactly the kind of expert input that makes AutoHaze better.

You are absolutely right about single_rat and multi_rat. I had experimented with auto-scaling them with turbidity but were seeing unnatural horizon colouration, which in hindsight makes complete sense given that they control the entire scattering intensity rather than aerosols alone. I have removed the auto single/multi feature entirely and left them at X-Plane's physically calibrated defaults for testing.  Users of Autohaze have probably been using HazeAdjust, and that is the reason I left it in - I'll ask for feedback on this - I personally do not tick Single or multi now due to the colorization problems it introduces..

The Linke turbidity formula is a significant correction. I had built an empirical lookup table that was substantially underestimating turbidity for a given AOD. I have now replaced it with the correct formula turbidity = (AOD + 0.1) / 0.1, which gives dramatically more realistic results. An AOD of 0.1 now correctly gives turbidity 2.0 rather than the 1.11 I had before.

I am also working on adjusting the visibility rendering alongside the turbidity — using the combined Koschmieder and Linke equations to derive a consistent vis-to-turbidity relationship (39/vis_km + 1) that is physically correct and consistent with the AOD formula. More on that in a future update.

Thank you again. The OPAC dataset reference was particularly helpful and the direct AOD-to-turbidity conversion has simplified the code considerably.

 

Edited April 22Apr 22 by MrBitstFlyer

3 hours ago, Franz007 said:

Here my actual settings. Is that good? 🙂

#

As you have 'Use Cams aerosol data' ticked, you may want to untick 'Fix BLH altitude' (unless you are testing).  further investigation and a very helpful post from @Maya2, I would recommend everyone untick Single and Multi.  I was using them mainly to tune flying into and out of haze.  However, those settings do introduce some colour issues.  I left them in because this script is a follow on from HazeAdjust.

58 minutes ago, MrBitstFlyer said:

#

As you have 'Use Cams aerosol data' ticked, you may want to untick 'Fix BLH altitude' (unless you are testing).  further investigation and a very helpful post from @Maya2, I would recommend everyone untick Single and Multi.  I was using them mainly to tune flying into and out of haze.  However, those settings do introduce some colour issues.  I left them in because this script is a follow on from HazeAdjust.

Thanks for your help 👍 Will do that. And another thing I noticed: at each refresh (300 sec) the sim freezes for about 5-10 seconds, although having excluded the script-folder from the virus-checks…

AutoHaze v1.9 is now available.

This update brings some significant improvements to the atmospheric physics, and I'd like to thank @Maya2 whose expert feedback was central to the changes in this release.

PHYSICS CORRECTIONS

The most important change in v1.9 is the replacement of the empirical AOD-to-turbidity lookup table with a physically correct conversion based on the Koschmieder and Linke turbidity equations. The formula is scaled to account for X-Plane's own base atmospheric scattering, giving a much more accurate relationship between real-world aerosol optical depth and the rendered sky appearance.

The visibility-to-turbidity curve has been updated to match, using the same underlying physics throughout. Both curves are now physically consistent with each other.

The practical result is that regional variation is much more convincing. California with low AOD looks genuinely clear with distant mountains visible through light haze. The UK with moderate AOD looks appropriately hazier. The Indo-Gangetic Plain with high AOD looks dramatically hazy. This variation was not possible with the previous approach.