Talk About the Weather

Yeah, lets! I wore my sunglasses this afternoon for the first time in a long time. That's a good thing since my car has a cracked, leaky windshield. When I got back from CES I had an inch of water under the dash. Blah.

A lot of other folks, like those on AvSim, are also talking about the weather--in Flight Sim, that is. Based on the comments and feedback I think this is another area where few people outside the team have an appreciation for the depth of the system. Did you know, for instance, that when you download real world weather the sim computes high- and low-pressure areas and cold/warm fronts? This data is used to drive the dynamic weather feature that changes weather over time based on relative values from nearby areas. If you're interested you can even view the intermediate computations in the weather map. This is what it looks like:

 

 

The illustration shows a grid of pressure values computed from the weather download. The darker the circle, the lower the pressure. You can see how the high and low systems are centered on clusters of like values. The line on the left represents a frontal boundary computed from temperature differentials.

To see this yourself, just add/change this line in the [Weather] section of FS9.CFG. (In case you don't know where to find FS9.CFG, read this.):

WeatherGraphDataInDialog=1

The denser the station grid, the better the results. Have fun!