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[Uzin]

Hi, Stainless,
with your knowledges of meteorology we can wait for using your program for RL local forecast based on the situation copied from TV news screens, huh ?
I admire your work.

[Pursuivant]

Four weather features which would be interesting to see in a sim, although probably a bitch to code.

1) Icing. Based on air temp, humidity, local precipitation, etc. The physics of it might be easier to figure out than the graphics for icing on wings, prop, carb, etc.

2) Accurate precipitation. Both in terms of type and volume. Fly into a thunderhead and have your plane get beaten up by melon-sized hailstones. Gain altitude and suddenly the rain you're flying through turns into freezing rain or snow.

3) Cloud and front turbulence. Fly into an 30 km tall anvil cloud and get your plane flipped over and torn apart by updrafts. Fly along the point where two fronts collide and experience clear air turbulence.

4) Wind interaction with terrain. Updrafts and downdrafts near mountains, terrain which blocks crosswinds on landing or take-off, daily onshore and offshore breezes in coastal areas. This would allow realistic air effects when flying through/over mountains or along coasts. Recreate Steve Fosset's last flight over the Sierra Nevadas, supply flights over "The Hump," or Alaskan bush pilot flights.

[Stainless]

1) Icing

Planned.  I know how to do it, how to apply the effects to an aircraft, just need the weather code to give me the correct variables.

2) Precipitation

In progress.   The work I am doing at the moment allows me to calculate the dew point for any given place on the planet at any given date. From the dew point and the data I already generate in the weather system we can get precipitation strength. I then need to add the temperature from the atmospheric model and we have precipitation type.

3) Cloud and front turbulence.

In progress. This was the real reason I decided to do a weather simulation.

4) Terrain effects

In progress. Follows on from the same code above.

[Stainless]

Haven't posted in a while, so thought I had better update y'all.

I now have code in place that takes latitude,longitude,time and date and returns the incident radiation from the sun.

I also have code in place that converts every pixel on the map to a latitude longitude pair.

When you create the package you define the latitude and longitude of the top left of the map, and the start date and time.

So finally after a lot of coding I can generate the heating effect of the sun for each pixel in the map.

I can use this along with the atmospheric data to give a fair estimate of the ambient temperature at every point on the map.

Lot of work, but getting there.

[Zoran395]

Very impressive.
It looks like you understood the client brief very well (or that the brief itself was quite clear!!!).
Oooops ... same person!

[BIOSURGE]

I have been quietly following your posts. You have a lot on your hands and it appears to be a great sim. I was wondering how far along are you at this time and do you have a demo, as in sneak peaks via you tube or a demo game yet??

Thanks Joe

[Stainless]

Not at that stage, it's a bunch of systems plugged together missing key ingredients.

When I have the weather system working (which is close now) I will plug a lot of it together into a demo.

[Stainless]

Finally some progress to show you.

I am calculating a relative temperature map based on the terrain type and the amount of solar radiation striking the land. The display is just a relative temperature. Red is warmer than green.

The green value is calculated by taking the sin of the scaled temperature. So it peeks in the middle of the temperature range. The red value is just the scaled temperature.




Now I can combine this with pressure values to generate location based clouds.
 

[Klaus109]

Excellent work Stainless . I am excited

Klaus109

[BIOSURGE]

Stainless,

While everything you are doing is very impressive and complicated, I am concerned what type of computer we will need to run all the math.  Some of us have updated systems, but I am sticking my neck out here, I believe and IMHO, most of us do not have state of the art systems. Do you know what the specs will be based on what you have now for running your sim. Video card, processor, ram memory?

Regards,

Joe

[Stainless]

The whole code base is designed to be configurable. You can turn on and off parts of the simulation until you achieve the desired frame rate.

[Pursuivant]

Seems like you have an incredibly solid grip on what needs to be done to get weather effects right. I'm massively impressed!

Dumbass question: Would it be possible to plug historical weather variables into the weather engine and get something that's halfway accurate?

Believe it or not, there's actually a lot of historical weather data from WW2, at least for Western Europe, although it's incomplete by today's standards. It would be amazing if, for example, you could grab a partial weather report from the UK Met office, for August 17, 1940 for Southwest England, plug it into a game engine, and get weather output that matches meteorological conditions that pilots faced on that day.

It might seem like trivia, but the weather was different back then, and the WW2 years were climatically strange, with some unusually cold and wet winters.