FS2002, Real world weather problem

In ,
wrote:

Yes, in my experience the real-world WX in FS2K4 often does not
reflect reality. The most recent example was yesterday.

We were receiving rain and thundershowers at KDSM/KIKV from about
2000Z on, with overcast conditions from about 1800Z. When I pulled
down real-world wx in FS2K4 at about 0200Z, cloud coverage was
"scattered", no rain.

Winds were pretty accurate though.


On Fri, 12 Sep 2003, John431 wrote:

I have been down loading real world weather. But, it doesn't match
the actual weather as determined from tuning in the FAA automatic
weather stations on the Internet.
http://www1.faa.gov/asos/map/map.htm. I've compared it by
listening to the ATIS at the airport of FS2002 and comparing it with
the actual FAA weather report. It is pretty far off. I've made
sure the time at the airport and the time of the weather report were
about the same.

Anyone else have this problem?

John431


I gather that FS2002 "downloads the weather for you". Does anyone know which URL
it goes to and is this in any way configurable by the user?

In other words, can you choose between TAF and METAR? (other than the coding
format, I'm not sure whether there's much difference between the two).

What I'm getting at is that there's more than one site for obtaining METAR data.
There's one where you input an ICAO code and it will send back a single report
for that Wx station, which is practically instant response
http://weather.noaa.gov/weather/metar.shtml

and there's the anonymous ftp metar-cycles files, which are global in scope but
around a megabyte each.

ftp://weather.noaa.gov/data/observations/metar/cycles/

At least that's the case by the time it has finished being appended to and is,
in effect, already time-expired. If you log on just after the hour and refresh
the page, to show the file sizes, you'll notice the current 'live' file is only
a few hundred bytes in size. As more reports roll in, the file grows and, where
the weather is changing rapidly, you may see dozens of reports, all from the
same station, dispersed throughout the document and appropriately timestamped.

I don't know whether 2002 uses the cycle files or, if so, whether it simply
searches for the appropriate ICAO code, according to your coordinates, and loads
up just the first report it finds, or if it reads the whole report, including
the timestamps and then switches the weather as soon as your FS clock reaches
the relevant values.

Then again, tt could just as easily work out what your nearest Wx station should
be and fire off successive requests to the single-report website. The next
question is, whether the results on that page are updated every time a new
report is issued, or only once per hour. I'll have to revisit it and see what it
says there.


--
regards,

Mark
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