Issue Weather depiction incorrect

[mrmercury]

Dear HiFi Team,


lately i observed something which was not the case in prior versions. I never had time to look into it, and because of many other cloud and environment addons i knew i would first need to have a clean vanilla version until i can share my observations. So yep, its time now ... So all my below observation is with vanilla XP 11.41r1 (build 114100 64-bit) with ASXP in realism mode and with the High-Res Clouds installed. No lua files, no reshade, no xvs ...

Basically its pretty straight forward. If ASXP (historic mode and real time tested) should give you bad weather, in the sim you actually see the precipitation but the rest is pretty nice .... blue skies, some clouds, good visibility ... I used ASXP’s search functionality and selected some ICAO’s from there for testing today.

Pictures are Thumbnails, click to enlarge ....

Historic Mode LGTS


Historic Mode LIMC


Real Weather EPRZ


Real Weather LIMJ



This one strangely worked pretty good … but it was the only one out of my lucky strike list

Real Weather LHBP


In general I know, since the last update I have seen also somewhere else bad weather, but right now you can clearly see that is not working 4 out of 5 times. The whole issue came up when I was doing a flight near my house in real weather and where it did not match.

Let me know what and if you need more information and help for pinning down the issue ...

 

[mrmercury]

here some which look more correct like the LHBP example above ... it seems to be related to cloud combinations and visibility... When clouds are BKN or OVC, then the weather actually shows more correct and you have limited visibility aswell ... whereas only FEW or SCT clouds result in visibility that is way to high (3rd example)

Real Weather LEPA


Real Weather LHKE


Real Weather DTTB ... here strangely the visibility is way to high to be real for this kind of condition


here a "bad" example again from CZFA ... notice how its TS but due to only SCT the general weather looks "pretty nice"

 

[damian]

Actually the biggest factor in the feel of these scenes is the visibility, from what I can see. In unlimited vis you get to see the clouds, and in reduced vis, you really can't. Precipitation triggers underneath clouds is handled by X-Plane. We don't override coverages indicated in METAR so if it says SCT that is what we depict. Thunderstorms generally don't exceed SCT coverage in reality unless for a squal line which may be somewhere more between SCT and BKN overall. Of course, there are micro areas here that will be under "overcast". Anything under a single cloud could be considered that. But for the whole depiction area (of about 75 miles square) the coverage should prevail if looking at averages.

Are you requesting some kind of override by user option, that might help always trigger a better look and feel that you might expect when you see TS in the METAR? Something like "Always force BKN with TS" ? or "Reduce visibility with TS" ? That is something we can consider. Feedback appreciated.

 

[mrmercury]

Hi Damian, thanks for getting back! Well, the visibility here is definitive a huge factor. The visibility should decrease with increasing precipation rate /humidity. Existing TS should also somehow alter the overall weather towards more "dark and grey". What would be bad is a TS override where "FEW" or "SCT" METAR will result in thick and closed cloud cover. But maybe its the best solution to have BKN 5/8 mixed to every TS cell ?

What do you think? I am not an expert, but the issue really jumped into my eye on that day in LGTS Region. There really was bad weather, TS, rain, grey and dark mood and low visibility. How comes the METAR gave 9999 visibility at that point? In general you can see, every time we have a TS with just FEW or SCT, even with moderate precip. the vis is reported as 9999 ... Could this be the issue?

 

[mrmercury]

Hi @damian before creating a new thread with same title let me report you this with the current ASXP Beta in combination with XP 11.50B11 ...

right now ASXP tells me



if i reselect the METAR.rwx file i will get this in XP




right after saving it, it will jump immediately to



so you see even the radar shows something different vs what i see in the sim





First i thought it was an UWXP issue, but its not related ... You can see in one of the screens that its disabled

I also tried the "refresh weather" from the Debug menu, but it does not show the correct weather. Attached also the ASLog.

Let me know if you need more information.

Best Regards,