Metars and Lightning

[Guest]

Hello,is there a way to control lightning, different strenght of rain and snow with a metar file, for example with the one generated by Infometar?Any help is welcome. Thanks in advance.Best regards :-wave

[Guest DSandberg]

The METAR spec includes "light/medium/heavy" intensity modifiers for precipitation elements. (Heavy is indicated by a trailing '+', light by a trailing '-', and medium is the default.) Fly! uses the information from these modifiers when it reads METARs, although I sometimes think that the visual rendering of light vs. heavy precip doesn't have a very obvious difference.There is no indicator for lightning intensity in the required elements of a METAR. Any trailing intensity modifier for the WX element must refer to an included precipitation element, not the thunderstorm element itself ... i.e., "TSRA+" is a valid WX element ("thunderstorm with heavy rain"), but "TS+" is not. Although the comments section of a METAR can describe lightning intensity, any such information is almost certainly not used by Fly!.If you want to try hand-editing these things, you'll need to be able to read the METAR spec well enough to change METARs without making them invalid. More information about the spec was previously available at http://www.nws.noaa.gov/oso/oso1/oso12/metar.htm ... however that URL seems to return an error now (I don't know if that's a temporary problem or if the site has been permanently removed).I'm not certain if I have actually answered your question or not - feel free to followup with any further questions.- David Sandberg[br][br]

[Guest]

David,Is this what that link used to point to?http://tgsv5.nws.noaa.gov/oso/oso1/oso12/fmh1/fmh1ch12.htmI found that link on this page...http://www.gimpster.com/php/phpweather/demo.phpnick

[Guest DSandberg]

Yep, that's it! Good find ... thanks! All of the current NOAA pages I looked at still seem to point to the older, apparently out-of-date link.- David Sandberg[br][br]

[Guest DSandberg]

A bit of METAR dyslexia ... should have typed "+TSRA" rather than "TSRA+" ...- red-faced David :-outta

[Guest]

David,thank you very much for your helpful answer. I was just wondering, why I didn't experience any thunderstorm yet using Infometar to generate metar files.Maybe I need to adjust the weather a bit after using FSbuild, your great tool Infometar and autoweather.Now I know it's possible, so I will find a way to do it ;-)Best regards :-wave

[Guest DSandberg]

Oh, you wanted to know how to make thunderstorms happen from METARs. You'll notice that I didn't actually answer that question ... that's because it has always been a problem and a bit of a mystery as to how to get thunderstorms to happen in Fly! or Fly2 when using METAR weather. I added a feature into InfoMETAR that attempts to force thunderstorms to appear in the sim when they should, but it doesn't work for everyone. What's been going on under the hood of the program in this regard has remained a bit of a mystery.Be assured that the beta squad has begun looking into this ...- David Sandberg[br][br]