On Tue, 11 Oct 2005 18:47:00 -0500, you wrote: >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
I believe MSFS and X-Plane do some kind of interpolation or transition between weather stations. I enjoy the challenge of flying in weather and am interested in weather. I've frequently compared the weather in a flight simulator to the local conditions. What I found was there frequently are insufficient reporting stations in many areas to match real weather conditions. There are some vast areas not covered by reporting stations or great distances between them. I have no way of knowing if they just did not get all existing stations, but I suspect this is not the case. I have checked for reporting stations on the NOAA site during hurricanes and have found they are often far apart. It would be good to include some kind of interpolation between stations and also a period update while in flight of real weather data. The interpolation should be as smart as practical, but I do not think it must be so precise as to model the weather in such a detailed manner. There are likely not enough reporting stations to do that anyway. Just blending the stations would useful and a start. The one improvement we could make over existing flight simulators is to avoid abrupt changes when the data updates. What bothers me most about these real weather systems not being able to logically anticipate weather ahead of the flight path. I think this is caused by level of details settings either covering up weather you should be seeing having it popup in front of you out of nowhere. Also, once weather is added, ATC will need to be updated to not accept flight plans from airports that are below minimums. Steve _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@flightgear.org http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel 2f585eeea02e2c79d7b1d8c4963bae2d
