Weather

[Challenger604]

Hello doing my 2 week trial considering joining. I've stumbled through my first touch and go circuit at SMX and most likely sounding like an idiot to the controller. Anyway my question is in regards to weather. When I am in FSX I set my game to real weather 15 min updates.. I have REX but not sure if I should use that instead? anyway I get weather from FSX which I notice is 2 hours past Zulu of the actual time then get totally different weather from the controller. How can I sync up my weather in my sim to what the controller is seeing?

[Donovan]

I'm sure there a number of options, but I found that Active Sky (I use ASE for the weather engine but use the textures from REX Overdrive) is consistently very close to the real time weather metars from NOAA and agrees very well with the real-time numbers provided by the PE Controllers. Have not used the latest Active Sky Next release, as I'm very pleased with the ASE/REX setup I'm using. Its likely a matter of personal taste, but I prefer the weather engine of Active Sky over REX. (Your mileage may vary )

Don

[Mark Hargrove]

I agree with Don that REX has the best weather textures and not the best weather engine -- and I think perhaps they're realized it too since they just released a new version of the application that is textures only (Google for REX4).

Active Sky Evolution (ASE), it's successor Active Sky 2012, or the newest version Active Sky Next (ASN) have very good weather engines -- ASN is supposed to be particularly good but I haven't seen it yet.

Another excellent option for a weather engine is OpusFSX. It's more accurate than ASE or AS2012, but I think it's going to be very hard to distinguish it from ASN from all that I've read. I don't think you could go wrong with either choice (but use REX 4 textures in either case).

-M.