DECOUPLE 33ft and 1600ft winds!

[TEMPEST.114]

as the title says...

The ratio between them is insane and not based in reality. 

Plus without a 'sea state' slider, the only way to get rough seas is to increase the 33ft winds but then the 1600ft winds turn even an F14 into a virtual helo!

EDIT: 

Despite this being asked for, for years now, all it took was 15 minutes to find, understand and then comment out 15 lines of lua in one file (and added 7).

It's not possible to add in the wind direction tool for the 1600ft winds because the back end doesn't allow the handle to the function. But it's usable as it is.

Plus you get a nice windshear now too!

The winds are now decoupled. 

See example (for openBeta)

UPDATE:

There is a missing ‘hook’ to force the weather DLL to stick to the set 1600ft wind speed, as it just wants to scale up or down in its own way. I spent 4 hrs today trying to get around that and enable the wind direction arrow wheel for the 1600ft winds but without that hook in the weather DLL I couldn’t do it.

The lines I removed force the 1600ft wind to be scaled from the ground and vice versa. I doubt there is anything in the weather DLL that’s duplicating that.

It must be a side effect of how weather DLL deals with wind gradients with altitude, plus the lack of forcing a non-scaled gradient via 1600ft wind setting being below the gradient means, this isn’t a complete solution. 

Sorry, it’s the best I can do. I just wanted to show ED that it’s trivial to decouple these. And with access to weather DLL to add the missing hook and fix the scaling it’s probably 30-60 mins in total to fix this. 

 

me_weather.lua

Edited November 9, 2022 by Elphaba

[Ironhand]

THANK YOU!!!

[PLUTON]

Exactly the case

[Ironhand]

Well...unfortunately, decoupling in the ME does not decouple them in the mission. Create a mission with a 1 m/s cross wind at 10 m for takeoff. Set the 500 m wind to the max. Take off and fly up through the levels. There will be no noticeable difference in how the aircraft handles.

[TEMPEST.114]

That’s odd. I set the 33ft to 97kt, and 10 at 1600ft, 12000ft, 24000ft and it showed that the wind speed dropped dramatically up to 5000ft then followed the settings. 
 

There is a missing ‘hook’ to force the weather DLL to stick to the set 1600ft wind speed, as it just wants to scale up or down in its own way. I spent 4 hrs today trying to get around that and enable the wind direction arrow wheel for the 1600ft winds but without that hook in the weather DLL I couldn’t do it.

The lines I removed force the 1600ft wind to be scaled from the ground and vice versa. I doubt there is anything in the weather DLL that’s duplicating that.

It must be a side effect of how weather DLL deals with wind gradients. 
 

Sorry, it’s the best I can do. I just wanted to show ED that it’s trivial to decouple these. And with access to weather DLL to add the missing hook and fix the scaling it’s probably 30-60 mins in total to fix this. 

[MARLAN_]

If I recall correctly the mission file/table inside of the *.miz does not contain parameters for the 1660ft winds and it is automatically generated based on winds at 33ft - that may be already what you're talking about with the weather.dll (not familiar with this) but it does seem currently to be a limitation until fixed in ED's back end

[TEMPEST.114]

9 hours ago, MARLAN_ said:

If I recall correctly the mission file/table inside of the *.miz does not contain parameters for the 1660ft winds and it is automatically generated based on winds at 33ft - that may be already what you're talking about with the weather.dll (not familiar with this) but it does seem currently to be a limitation until fixed in ED's back end

The weird thing is they DO have handles in the back end for it, but the hooks into the weather dll that is driving it all don't exist. It would be like minutes to duplicate the code for the 8000m ones to be the 500m ones... but until they do it, this 'fix' is only half complete.  

I did the best I could with what I have available. ED need to put someone on this for like 30 mins and it's done. 

[TEMPEST.114]

Just want to add, if you do a reciprocal wind for the 6600ft wind that is equal or greater than the 33ft wind, the WEATHER.DLL will skew the gradient such that the wind at 1600ft will be virtually gone and the winds aloft will be strong as will the surface wind.

This is the best way of high surface wind, low 1600ft wind until/if ED every fix Weather.dll 

[JupiterJoe]

Have the Devs seen this thread?  Great analysis by o.p.

[TEMPEST.114]

On 1/3/2023 at 10:05 PM, JupiterJoe said:

Have the Devs seen this thread?  Great analysis by o.p.

Thanks, but your guess is as good as mine. 

[realflight]

tnx

[JupiterJoe]

Could a Dev please take a look at the original post and comment?  

[grant977]

I’ll bump this. This needs to happen guys please.

[mhe]

Yes please. This is required for quite a few scenarios. 

[HC_Official]

I have just found this thread and it answers why the METAR weather script is now borked, the wind speed at 33ft is now being multiplied to get wind speed at 1600ft

Which makes the wind insanely strong and far too hard to fly in

[HC_Official]

I have updated the METAR script to handle this weirdness better , currently the "rough" ratio is 33ft (10M)  times  2.12 = 1600ft (500m) wind speed ........... which makes it insanely hard to fly in

[Northstar98]

Wanted to bump this, there's no reason why the 1600 ft/500 m wind speed and direction should be coupled in this way, it leads to excessively high wind speeds and it doesn't take long in something like Windy to see that it doesn't match with what's expected IRL.

For instance, at the time of writing (14/11/2023 @ ~14:00Z), Windy is reporting that the surface wind speed over Andersen AFB on Guam is 18 knots and the wind speed at 2000 ft/600 m (closest I could get to 1600 ft/500 m with Windy) is 26 knots. In DCS, if I try setting the 33 ft wind speed to 18 knots, it forces me to have 39 knots at 1600 ft/500 m (or, in other words, 50% larger that what it should be). For comparison the highest Windy is showing is 32 knots at 45,000 ft/13,500 m.

Edited November 16, 2023 by Northstar98
Added % difference to highlight how much larger the wind speed is in in DCS

[norman99]

I'd also like this addressed. Significant wind increases within 500ft are frustrating when operating around the boat.

 

[Northstar98]

Yeah, I've been trying to set historically accurate weather for some of my missions (using resources like weatherspark which has a fairly comprehensive and easy to digest record).

But the wind speed at 500 m just being ~2.125× the wind speed at 10 m (at least for metric) in the exact same direction is a massive pain in the backside and it isn't at all realistic.

As I said above it isn't difficult to use a program such as windy (which takes data from forecasting models - which may be off from what weather stations are actually reporting) to see the difference.

It would be far better if it worked like the other wind layers, where we can have a user defined direction and speed.

@BIGNEWY @NineLine

Spoiler

For instance, today at 13:20Z, the surface winds at RAF Mount Pleasant, from METAR reports, was 280° @ 25 knots. If I were to set this speed in DCS, I would be stuck with 52 knots at 1600 ft in DCS.

Constrast that to Windy which is showing that the ECMWF is forecasting 34 knots, GFS 27 knots and ICON 22 knots at 2000 ft (though bear in mind that all 3 forecasting models are predicting lower than measured surface winds (a difference of 4, 8 and 13 knots respectively). If I were to take the difference, double it and then add that value to the respective forecasted winds, I would still only get 42, 43 and 48 knots at 2000 ft, which is still a percentage difference of ~10-20%.