Configuring weather for realism

[z0civic]

Hey there,

Alright, first off, I have searched and read a handful of posts about struggles and preferences people have had with different tools/plugins. I was hoping to kind of compile this all together in a single post for myself and the future reference of others.

With that out of the way...

I'm trying to accomplish weather that is as close to real life as possible. I have the latest SkyMaxx Pro and RealWeatherConnector. I also have tried the NOAA plugin, X-Plane's native weather, and some others.

I'm wondering what kind of settings and combinations of plugins people have been using that yielded the most realistic results? There are a myriad of settings for all these different plugins, as well as for X-Plane itself, and it'd be nice to have some guidance. 

It's really nice to have the bottom layer of clouds I'm flying over when I'm at FL300+, but it's IMPERATIVE that I have accurate weather on approach and landing. For example, I was using NOAA + RWC the other day when landing at KORD and had to fight with a 20kt crosswind that wasn't actually there! (The METAR online stated I should be landing into a headwind - so this made things a bit interesting).

Is there a way to ensure that below a certain elevation I get updates more frequently or any kind of certainty that they match the actual METAR reports for that airport? 

I know when I've used X-Plane's native weather, it's done something similar where it hasn't updated for a while, I'm getting around 3000 AGL and I can tell the weather isn't matching up with what I'm seeing in my METAR reports so I go tell it to "Update Now!" and get violent changes in the weather.

 

If this has already been answered before or there are guides out there or something, please just point me to those as I would be apparently inept at searching.