Tracking the weather

[Andy B.]

Hi,

 

Talking flight monitor users want to experience the weather with automatic announcements of weather changes. For example, some users are interested in knowing when the aircraft enters/exits a cloud. They want to know what type of cloud it is and if it is raining/snowing/hailing/sleeting and so on. They also want to know if it is possible to get a polygon of GPS coordinates (3d) of a storm, cloud, or other weather event. This will help them be able to request diversions from ATC. Is this possible with the FSUIPC .net library? If not, what would it take to add something that can do this?

 

[Paul Henty]

Hi Andy,

The basic FSUIPC weather facilities can tell you the general conditions at either the player location, at lat/lon location, or a weather station (airport). However, it cannot tell you exact positions of clouds etc. You can know the player is in a "broken" cloud layer with rain for example, but you won't know if the player is inside one of the clouds or not.

Examples of using the weather facilities are in the Example Application. It's not available in FSUIPC7 however. (Uses offset 0xC000).

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If not, what would it take to add something that can do this?

FSUIPC4, 5 and 6 have a link to a third-party weather application called ActiveSky Next, If you have that, FSUIPC can extract a weather radar bitmap or array to a file on the disk. Potentially your application could use that to work out positions of actual clouds\rain (as displayed by ActiveSky). They don't seem to have a version for MSFS though. 

See the document called "ASN WX Radar facilities in FSUIPC.pdf" in the FSUIPC documents folder.

Paul

[Andy B.]

Hi,

 

I am wondering if there is a way to track the 3 dimensional aspect of clouds? At the moment, we can get the height of a cloud layer, but are interested in getting its length and width. Is this possible, or will we have to deal with using only the height?

[Paul Henty]

FSUIPC only has the height of the cloud layer.

You could try sampling the weather from various lon/lat points around the aircraft. This might give you a rough idea of how far the clouds extend.

I'm not sure how slow/fast that will be though, or if it will bear any relation to the clouds you can see on the screen. 

Paul