Re: [Flightgear-devel] How does the weather work in FlightGear?

[Adam Dershowitz]

On Oct 10, 2005, at 10:26 AM, Ampere K. Hardraade wrote: On October 10, 2005 03:37 am, Erik Hofman wrote: Buchanan, Stuart wrote: FlightGear can fetch the current weather at your starting airport, or you can set the wind, cloud layers etc manually. I don't know if the weather conditions are global, or change as you fly to different locations. It interprets the data from the nearest METAR station. The data is fetched from noaa.gov. Erik In my opinion, it would be better if data from multiple nearby METAR stations  is used instead of fetching data from only one station.  I often fly with  real-weather-fetch enabled, and the plane gets a huge jolt whenever the  weather is updated.  The change in the visual aspects is also too sudden.   Using data from multiple METAR stations could avoid the above problems and  allow us to have a smooth transistion in weather. Ampere This is not as obvious as it would first seem.  Some weather phenomena have very sharp transitions and some are gradual.  So I don't think that "interpolating weather" is a trivial thing to do.   For example a cold front is often a very well defined line with rain right along the front.  In that case the weather right nearby is the best indicator and a METAR from 5 miles away could give a completely different story.  Airmass thunderstorms are another example where very local weather is what matters.  To make maters worse the METAR will just have temperature and wind, so you would have to look at a few different locations and times to figure out that a front has passed.  And the local geography (mountains, lake effects, shore lines) can also be a significant issue. I am not saying that it could not be done, just that it would take some real thought and real understanding of weather phenomena for it to apply in the general case rather than just in a few specific case and make things worse other times. --Adam

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