Colder weather scenarios missing?

[vnts]

This is from a ticket in the issue tracker about some UI tweaks.

Judging by the greyed out METARs all the weather scenarios are on the warm side. Is this the case, or am I missing something (I've used FG intermittently since I started so I'm still somewhat new).

So unless it's just me, this means that newcomers will miss out on snow etc. - as well as people not typing in custom METARs, and people using live METARs who are not flying in the hemisphere with the cold season over a region that also needs to have cold weather and snowfall at that year/time.

James said [1] it was an idea to add more scenarios in time for the upcoming 2020 LTS. Is this possible, or is there a technical reason that makes it hard?

About the cold-weather scenarios, that one you can simply do yourself: the files live in FGData, add some new scenarios, set the descriptions, this would be very welcome. And we can safely include them in the upcoming release. Edits to the descriptions or existing scenarios are also possible.

We could also make a code mod, that a scenario can request summer/winter textures? (When ALS is off?) Need to think about that a bit more.

If this is the case, I can also make a suggestions wanted thread under the Flightgear project section to fill big gaps in the range of scenarios.

Kind regards

[Thorsten]

Judging by the greyed out METARs all the weather scenarios are on the warm side. Is this the case, or am I missing something

Actually the AW offline engine had the option to specify a temperature offset - so if you put a low pressure system at low temperature, you'd get lots of snowfall. The rational is that the base temperature is basically an independent variable - a warm sector is warmer than a cold sector during the same season, but a warm sector in winter is certainly colder than a cold sector in summer.

I'm not quite sure how the current UI makes use of the option, but in principle it exists.

I don't think anyone is working on more weather scenarios - at least I stopped adding them since real estate in the combo-box to select them was getting tight and they didn't really add much value as it turned out in discussions we'd need literally a few dozen to give everyone his favourite, at which point it doesn't make sense to use a combo-box any more. Certainly different base temperature isn't 'new' in any sense the offline weather engine would believe.

(You do get nice ice scattering phenomena on fog when it's cold and the sun is out...)