Wind direction, standard temperature and QNH

[Syd]

I was thinking about writing this post for a long time but didn't know where to put it. Since this new section emerged, here are my thoughts about weather engine and it's flaws/bugs that I wish could be fixed.

1) WIND.
Ideally one could choose between setting navigational ("to") and meteorological ("from") wind. It always brings up confusion in multiplayer missions with live ATC when people forget that they should add/subtract 180 degrees from the ME wind setting in order to have useful in-flight wind. The one that is  being set right now (navigational) is used during preflight route calculations which is virtually non-existent in DCS. So it would be great to at least change it to meteorological wind setting ("from") as this is the most useful.

 

Second thing - ME's setting is nav wind ("to") in knots, then the briefing report shows nav wind in m/s and in the end ATC reports it as meteorological ("from") wind in m/s. So we end up with three different wind report types! Why!? Pick one and stick to it. Ideally meteorological in knots everywhere since this is the one mostly used around the world.

 

Third - wind layers in mission briefing are called GRND, 2000m and 8000m. Again why? Stick to ME values: 33ft, 1600 etc. What's more it's misleading, because GRND isn't GRND at all since if you are taking off from Vaziani for instance, than you are automatically in the 1600ft layer which by default has twice the wind set in 33ft (shown as GRND in briefing). Also, this "33ft" is strange. Why not just call it 0ft or sea lvl.
 
2) TEMPERATURE. This is a minor thing, but why is standard temperature in DCS 16*C? It is 15*C IRL.

3) PRESSURE. Whole QNH system should be remodelled. ME's QNH setting should be renamed to pressure at sea level. IRL QNH is calculated for each aerodrome individually based on local weather conditions. In DCS it is set for a whole map, but once you set temperature other than DCS's standard (16*C in DCS), QNH setting becomes useless for different aerodromes. I guess present system with QFE in briefing is a sort of walkaround but it could be fixed for instance with an option to ask tower about QNH (correctly calculated for each aerodrome of course).
To be honest If I would dive into this topic than I would need to address the altimeter simulation, the aircraft's altitude setting in mission editor and a few more things. But these are much bigger issues.

This whole post might be considered as nitpicking by most, and they're probably right. DCS experience is great despite above issues and I wouldn't be surprised if I didn't get any response to it, especially from the ED's side. With new stuff coming in all the time I guess they have more important things to focus on than wind units. Still it felt good to address those things and maybe in some time have someone look into them.

[Canada_Moose]

Complete overhaul of the weather engine and inclusion of dynamic weather is coming later. This has already been said by ED.

[Syd]

That would be great if ED would fix the above in a process.. I had high hopes during new clouds release and though 2.7 is an awesome visual improvement, underneath it's the same old stuff.

[Canada_Moose]

48 minutes ago, Syd said:

That would be great if ED would fix the above in a process.. I had high hopes during new clouds release and though 2.7 is an awesome visual improvement, underneath it's the same old stuff.

 

Agreed, but they did make it clear that the new clouds was primarily visual and engine changes would come later. They were upfront about it.

[Ironhand]

4 hours ago, Syd said:

Also, this "33ft" is strange. Why not just call it 0ft or sea lvl.

 

Because 10m (32.8 ft) is the standard bottom read.

[Syd]

33 minutes ago, Ironhand said:

 

Because 10m (32.8 ft) is the standard bottom read.

Could you explain the "standard bottom read" thing? I'm not familiar with this.

[Dragon1-1]

It's the altitude at which the wind "at sea level" is measured. Since building a weather station floating right on the sea surface would be rather problematic, and the wind doesn't change that much across 10m, it's measured higher up. On land, it also saves you trouble with random person-height objects such as the weather station's fence.

[Ironhand]

13 minutes ago, Syd said:

Could you explain the "standard bottom read" thing? I'm not familiar with this.

 

As Dragon1-1 has noted, it's the base altitude for reporting wind speed and direction. It usually goes something like: 10m, 100m, 250m, etc.

[Syd]

Forgot about measuring station's mast height. Tnx Dragon

[Syd]

One more thing just in case anyone from ED reads this stuff Wind is reported using thee figures, rounded to the nearest 10 degrees magnetic. For example wind 037 degrees would be reported as 040 degrees.