Real World Weather-Real Problems

[kevin2003]

Forum members familiar with RWW may be able to help me with this one.Each time I fly with RWW loaded(udate every 15 mins) the same thing happens at below 2000ft on final approach.The visuals turn instantly to fog with visibilty less than 2 miles.This surely could'nt be right.This happens irrespective of location,time/season and with all temporary file deleted before loading.

This morning I loaded a flight from my nearest airport,EIME, and got "scattered cloads,wind 026/07,visibility 2 miles.In fact, today there are no clouds,wind calm and unlimited visibility.Am I expecting too much from this feature or am I missing something?

Any advice most welcome.

regards

kevin

[Reap]

I don't have much experience with RWW but I can recomend ActiveSky to give excellent weather and is pretty accurate. Unfortunately payware, but probably worth it in my opinion.

[Brett_Henderson]

Though the program itself does retrieve new weather data every 15 minutes.. I doubt the reporting stations are accurate to 15 minute intervals. I live near KOSU and at times, the weather I load in the sim is the EXACT thing I'm looking at out my window, right downt to the barometer sitting on my desk. Other times not, but it's usually pretty close.

That "sudden" cloud/fog layer you'll always fly into on final is indeed annoying (not as annoying as that same damn tree, right at the approach end of EVERY little airport you're landing at for the first time). It seems if the visibility is limited at all.. the sim sees that as a reason to throw minimums at you, out of nowhere (you can't even see a hint that it's coming) right on final.. all the time. The wind transitions climbing and descending are kinda annoying too. Way too sudden and way too "shear".

I've tried a couple thrid-party weather programs (Active Sky and Meteo). They're a little better, but not better enough to warrant running another, ram-eating program.. when you fly detailed, third-party planes into busy airports (hurts frame-rates).

Maybe they'll fix this in FS2006 ?

[willg]

I have a similar little annoyance. If there are a few rainclouds in real life, on the sim, everywhere is rainy and foggy. If theres a few clouds with mainly sunny spells in real life, its a hundred percent cloudless in real life, it seems to exaggerate weather. You can far better, and more accurate weather if you go into the advanced weather.

[wji]

I fly FS9 IFR and RWW every flight and just presume when the viz is zero-zero that's what it is. My FS9 setup does not show up low viz unless those are the realworld conditions.

It oftens happens -- after flying FS9 half-way-round-the-world -- the six o'clock news will show a report with the exact FS9 weather we encounted while there just hours before.

I presume the FS9 low viz being only visible at low altitude has more to do with autogen or the same way rain is replicted in FS9. Regarding the latter anomalies, may i suggest checking with higher authority.

bill

P.S. I find RWW a great feature of FS9 and if flying locally, it saves me from looking out the window to see what the weather is doing :-)

[MattNW]

I get the same thing. FS does exaggerate the visibility a lot. When it's 15 miles in RL the sim will set it to 10 and that will be a very conservative 10 (more like 5-8 in my opinion).

Best workaround I've found is to look it up on a weather service (most let you search by airport code) and then set the weather to that by hand. For long distance flights and airport to airport airline flying RWW might be OK but it's far from perfect for low level IFR stuff. I also kind of think it may be due to the video card since some people have this problem and some don't.