Weather Update Key

[JustinWheat]

Is there a way to have a switch on your joystick to click to update the weather within X Plane 10 on grab real weather from the net? I would to be able to map a switch instead of having to click around to update every time. Thanks!

[Matthias Geiss]

As of 10.40, this should be possible by assigning a button/key to the command sim/operation/regen_weather.
However, I am unable to confirm this, because I'm still running 10.36.

[Keith Smith]

If you've set up x-plane to pull real time weather, it'll do so every hour by itself. Doing it multiple times within a GIVEN hour (ie, between 3pm and 4pm) is unlikely to yield any change in the weather based on what I recall from x-plane's logic as to which weather it pulls, because it's going to request the last complete hour (ie, 2pm). So, each time you request the update with a given hour, it's going to be pulling down effectively the same weather.

However, there could be value in doing it one time, just after the top of the first hour when you fire up the sim.

[Matthias Geiss]

Afaik X-Plane uses the weather data provided by the station(s) nearest to your current position, and extrapolates this to the area in which you are in. So no matter if you have flown a distance of 100nm or 400nm within the update interval of 1h, you would still see the same weather, even if other weather stations (with totally differnet data) are now closer to your plane.
Manually updating the weather in shorter intervals will probably set a more current weather for your local position, even if there is no new global data available.

I will check the weather functionality with FS Global Real Weather as soon as I update to 10.4X, as I already have FSGRW installed for FSX. This should give better transitions and more up to date weather without the need for manual updates.

[Keith Smith]

Matthias,

That was the case for XP9, but the XP10 weather engine is completely different. It allows multiple weather systems to be loaded at the same time (seeded by all the r/w METARs). It's not the case that updating more frequently is going to provide smoother transitions in xp10.

[Matthias Geiss]

I stand corrected. Obviously, I didn't follow the development of X-Plane as close as I would like to.
That being said, I don't have any real issues with X-Planes real weather out of the box, despite the little pauses while updating every hour.