Well, for the GUI, I'd like a bit more of a less complex one (e.g. airmass amounts - what airmass? Cold airmass? Warm airmass?).
I don't understand - which dialog/setting is that comment aimed at?
And yes, when I use METAR mode in advanced weather I'd like to see the raw METAR report.
I'd like METAR data to show and to be parsed into cloud/wind whether it's selected as Basic, Advanced or pasted from another source.
The talk has been to separate METAR into a different dialog so that it can be fetched and parsed and looked at before deciding to execute it.
One problem is that METAR can't be uniquely parsed in cloud and wind info, because it doesn't contain the relevant information.
Wind: A METAR string contains the wind on the ground at one location. That wind is almost certainly measured in the boundary layer, i.e. the wind at 1000 ft above the location may be up to a factor 2 stronger. At higher altitudes, the wind pattern may be completely different from what METAR has to say. In mountain regions, the ground winds will reflect the deflection of air by the terrain rather than the large-scale wind patterns. Without an online aloft wind pattern source, the higher-altitude winds based on METAR are just a random guess.
Terrain: A serious problem with manually entered METAR strings is that they don't contain the station altitude information. However, that is highly relevant because the actual cloud base is station altitude plus the cloud layer altitude reported in METAR. Not a problem in flat terrain since you can always use the local terrain elevation at aircraft position, but a problem in mountains.
Cloud info: METAR just tells you that there is
n/8 cloud coverage at
m feet. This doesn't specify what the clouds are (a 6/8 layer can be a Stratus with a visible edge, or a closing Stratocumulus development, and they look totally different) or how they're distributed - a 4/8 cloud cover can be an undulatus pattern, few large patches with gaps inbetween or many small individually separated clouds. Again, the system has to guess this.
It's good if the drop down scenarios update wind and cloud tables which can then be tweaked before applying to the sim session.
This only works for the Basic Weather setup: A gui to manually readjust the full cloud and wind information going on inside the Advanced Weather simulation is huge - the problem is that Advanced Weather changes that information in space as well as in time. You don't have one table of cloud configurations, you have one per weather tile (same with winds) which at startup would give you 9 (!) times the size of the current Basic Weather interface, i.e. you'd end up with a gui spread over several pages. I judged that impractical.
Even worse with turbulence - turbulence in Advanced Weather is often tied to locations (a thermal, a thunderstorm,...) - so you'd need to edit about 1000 different locations to set the turbulence distribution of a Cumulus sky manually.
Turbulence: 0-9 selection in each Wind layer seems adequate.
No, it isn't - way not realistic enough, turbulence usually is not a layer phenomenon, it is either a vertical air motion phenomenon, created by an obstacle or occurs at the boundary of air layers with different windspeeds.
Clear Fog ( cheat ) .. doesn't the 'Z' hotkey accomplish that ?
You don't fly with Advanced Weather, do you
The key doesn't work when Advanced Weather is running. If you want to make clouds vanish, the cloud visibility range in the rendering dialog does the trick nicely.
Polly: In summary, you basically would like a Basic Weather ++, i.e. not really any of the features of Advanced Weather (like location-specific weather effects of spatial changes of... anything) but rather more control over what comes in from METAR before it is applied to the Basic Weather interface, so METAR should be fetched, parsed and passed into the table, then you'd like to edit the table, then you'd like to run the edited version. Is this a fair represenation of what you said?