Precipitation and Icing

[THaBoHNix]

Hi,

I was just flying over the Alps using SMP v4.6 with RWC and FS Global Real Weather as a data supply. I had Garmin Pilot running in parallel and was observing some very heavy thunderstorms with strong precipitation in the area on the iPad. In the sim I was indeed able to see many of SMP’s „new“ big cumulonimbi, but:

- In reality, storms were rather concentrated in a few larger cells than distinct CB‘s. In X-Plane however, I was seeing huge CB‘s up to FL350 all around, regularly distributed.

- After circumnavigating the first ones, I flew right into one because there was absolutely NO precipitation indicated neither on the G1000 NEXRAD nor on the X-Plane map (which is essentially the same). And indeed, in the CB nothing happened - no turbulence, no precip, no icing at all. It was the same in all other storms and clouds until landing. In fact, there were just two tiny patches of light precipitation on the whole map!

I‘m writing about this because it was not the first observation of this type. Since I’m using SMP+RWC+FSGRW I had actually just one situation with light to moderate icing and precipitation that was also visible on X-Plane‘s map/NEXRAD - and I am flying in stormy/rainy weather very often. Quite often I can see SkyMAXX‘s precipitation but it doesn’t seem to have any effect on the plane (which makes sense if it‘s not visible on the map and therefore non-existing for X-Plane). So, in my sim environment  SMP‘s cloud depiction is very good, but - in most cases they‘re just absolutely harmless which is not realistic at all. To me it seems like the FSGRW to SMP to X-Plane link doesn‘t work that good regarding precipitation, maybe the weather supply is the issue?

Maybe you have some ideas about how to change this as the experience in bad weather is quite annoying so far. If you need some other data, just let me know!

Thank you and best regards.

[sundog]

Neither FSGRW nor X-Plane's built in weather system has access to precise real-world placement of storm cells. The best they can infer from the METAR data is "there are storms North of the airfield" (or some direction,) but more often it's just "there are storms around here somewhere." In that case, RWC just scatters them about randomly surrounding the station reporting those conditions for lack of anything better that it can do.

If you have SMP configured to take control of precipitation (see its precipitation control panel), you should at least see precipitation visual effects where it should be associated with SMP's individual clouds. But there is no way for plug-ins such as SMP or RWC to communicate back to X-Plane to tell it where it positioned individual CB clouds, so it can create a consistent experience with winds and the radar. Laminar contacted us a long time ago about extending their plugin API to allow us to do that, and we even wrote some code into SMP to support it - but that feature hasn't made it into X-Plane yet.

So for now, it's behaving as well as is possible within X-Plane's architecture. As far as I know, SMP is the only weather add-on that even attempts to represent individual storm cells with cumulonimbus and towering cumulus clouds, so it's sort of a bleeding edge thing still.

 

 

Edited May 13, 2018 by sundog

[THaBoHNix]

Thank you for the explanation! For sure SMP‘s cloud representation is absolutely astonishing, at least now I know why the link between SMP‘s cloud / precipitation placement and X-Plane is not possible so far. We‘ll see what future updates of both can bring!