FLY2 not accurately displaying weather from METAR file

[Guest desmondw]

Hi All, has anyone else consistantly had the weather at any given point not be even close to what the METAR file is telling it.I am using David's excellent Infometar program to thin my weather for every flight but FLY2 never seems to display the weather it is supposed to. i.e. today I was going from Saskatoon Int. to Edmonton, the weather in the thined METAR file at Saskatoon was:Wind 030 at 8, there were a few clouds at 10000 the temp. was 27/13 & the Pressure was 29.83. For whatever reason FLY2 thought it would be better to give me:Wind 237 at 3, Clouds Sct 4489, Few 12??? & Bkn 19???, the temp. was 20 & Pressure 29.91. I have noticed this on almost every flight for every point along the route. Any ideas to fix this would be greatly aprieciated, Right now I am punching in the correct weather at the departing airport, then 25 miles out I am loading the weather file & 25 miles to my arriving airport I punch in the correct weather. This is not a big deal but it would be nice to have FLY read the file accurately. Thanks in advance for any answers.Desmond

[RandallR 446]

Desmond,This is a difficult question to answer. A lot of work went into the final patch release to correct issues with the weather system and how it responded to metars. David Sandberg, the creator of Infometar, put in a lot of hours with Richard Harvey to adjust Fly!II's responses and interpretation. It was not perfect and some items were left unanswered - there just wasn't enough time to investigate and correct or adjust every item, as Richard's health was failing pretty fast in the end.They worked very hard to get a realistic response. To aid them, I flew about 50 hours of test flights, constantly testing the weather interpretations and reporting back to them after each coding adjustment or variance in thinning patterns. It was never perfect, but in the end we were satisfied that the interpretation was good most of the time. David also changed his final recommendation from 30 miles btwn stations to 0 miles in the end - I still switch back to 30 miles on occasion to see if the results improve. Fly!II has always been inconsistent in its metar interpretation, yet I was satisfied for the most part. It seemed as though it was very close about 70% of the time.Like you, I've noticed a "drift" in accuracy lately - it seems that many metar imports are giving results that are nowhere near the reported weather environment. Yet, there has been no one around who could have changed Fly!II's weather engine. I've been wondering whether the NOAA has made some fundamental changes in the metar files that are now being misinterpreted by Fly!II, or whether some of the new aircraft and other upgrades that developers have added to the Fly!II system have somehow "corrupted" the weather engine. This doesn't seem possible - yet, it seems that something has to have changed the system or affected accuracy.A final note. I usually fly with C4TO as my ATC environment. C4TO, for the most part, does a great job of assigning active runways for best use of surface winds. I've noted a great disparity with "reported winds" and "actual winds". I'll get a controller report of winds that will match the Fly!II environment (not the METAR). Then, the controller will assign a runway totally misaligned with those winds! However, in many cases, that runway assignment will be in exact alignment with the correct winds of the METAR! Very, very strange. It's as though portions of the metar are actually being interpreted properly, but are not being reported properly by the weather overview system. To be fair, C4TO is designed to align with the winds that are just above the surface for proper aircraft control, if they are in variance with the surface air. Lately, however, the variance has been so large that it's almost as though the entire world is living in a kind of "wind-shear" mode. Sort of a Twilight Zone moment... :-hmmm

[Guest desmondw]

Hi Randall, Thankyou so much for your reply, I was beginning to think that it was a happening that was only in my Sim & was wondering what I could have done to it, as you say I thought it used to be more accurately applied in FLY2. At least I am now satisfied that I havn't screwed up my program.Thanks Desmond