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Wind Direction on the Ridge


Avidean

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See the attached Screen shoot. You can see that I have set the wind direction to 158, about perpendicular to the ridge at 8knots. However see the CumulusX Debug window. It shows the wind at 252 about parrallel to the ridge. That's no good! :chairfall_s: Might as well go look for a thermal.

Anybody know why?

On another note. Peter 1.9 is superb. Very realistic, from an

FAI Silver Badge pilot. :bow_down2_s:

post-35418-0-36976900-1357663886_thumb.p

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Hi,

it is important to know, that the simplfied weather dialogue only defines the surface wind conditions up to 2000 feet AGL, while winds aloft are set to zero. Surface winds are related to the surface conditions at a weather station, which is normally not at sea level. When FSX calculates the actual winds, it takes the wind stack of a number of nearby weather stations and performs a sort of interpolation of the wind data, which are not only different in strength and direction, but also the ground level is different for the different stations. so the surface wind setting is not referenced to the ground elevation at your position, but recalculated into an absolute altitude, referenced by the ground elevation of involved weather station. The result is a pretty unpredictable mess in wind conditions, in particular in mountain areas.

Then, there is a bug in FSX weather engine, which prevents from updating even the surface wind conditions, when the rate of change (In Options/Settings/Display/Weather) is set to zero and there is not any wind layer aloft.

Please note also, that the wind reporting in the status line references magnetic north, while the weather settings understand true north (the debug panel shows also true north, alas, not very important in Europe). There seems to be a constant offset of 6° between the weather settings input (true) and the resulting wind directions (true).

There are more bugs with handling of the magnetic deviation. For example, in the weather map, winds are denoted with magnetic directions, but also drawn as if it is referenced as true north (go to NZ and have fun).

Yet another bug in the depiction of the wind situation in the advanced weather dialogue is, that the surface wind layer is shown, as if it extends to sea level. Instead it is effective from the elevation upwards of the related weather station. Go to a high altitude airport with a weather station and try yourself! (If you like).

So I recommend in any case pressing the "Advanced weather" button and insert another wind layer well above your expected altitude range of flying and give it a similar strength and directon of the surface wind. This should do. If you do that, you will also have an appropriate update of the surface wind, regardless of the rate slider.

If you want try out wind graduation, I recommend deactivating the surface wind layer altogether by giving it a thickness of 0.

best regards,

Peter

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Thank you very much Peter. Very detailed reply, thanks for taking the time. Would you say I would get better results using the weather engine in REX Essential Plus?

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I can't say anything on this. I use AS2012 occasionally, but didn't intensive testing. The problem with the weather extensions is that they play around with frequent updating of the weather station, which might result in illogical behaviour of the thermals. However, whenever I used it I didn't observe any obvious problems.

If anything I would recommend the "standard depiction" mode which is roughly the same what MS does and certainly not the DWC mode. The latter one gives better wind control, but the entire weather situation is tied to where you are just in the moment. When you move forward, the conditions will be updated to the new location, and thus all thermals in range will (possibly visibly) react on that, by adjusting their locations, or popping in and out.

best regards,

Peter

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  • 2 months later...
  • 2 months later...

I can't say anything on this. I use AS2012 occasionally, but didn't intensive testing. The problem with the weather extensions is that they play around with frequent updating of the weather station, which might result in illogical behaviour of the thermals. However, whenever I used it I didn't observe any obvious problems.

If anything I would recommend the "standard depiction" mode which is roughly the same what MS does and certainly not the DWC mode. The latter one gives better wind control, but the entire weather situation is tied to where you are just in the moment. When you move forward, the conditions will be updated to the new location, and thus all thermals in range will (possibly visibly) react on that, by adjusting their locations, or popping in and out.

best regards,

Peter

Hi Peter thanks for CumulusX 1.9 love the birds and cloud shadows!

Just wanted to report that I have recently switched to OpusFSX after being a long time AS2012 customer. OpusFSX does a much better job at ensuring that CumulusX! thermals are persistent. In AS2012 no matter what weather depiction mode I used, thermals would pop in and out much more frequently especially on weather updates. I also like the weather depiction in OpusFSX and now just use AS2012 for it's ability to create weather influenced textures.

Cheers

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Hi Harry,

I have AS2012 either and with CumulusX! I use the standard depiction mode normally. But in principle you are right. "Overriding" of FSX weather stations by adding and removing multiple "corrective" stations is a potential issue for CumulusX! thermal gneration.

best regards,

Peter

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