What Weather model Infinite Flight uses?

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Hello dear community,

As a Hurricane Hunter here, weather radars are important for me to track the storms around the North part of the globe.

For this, i use different weather radars, but sometimes they can differ, you know from the ICON model to the GFS one there’re little differences.
I’m wondering , wich one IF uses for it’s live weather in term of winds?

Thank you,

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Windy is a good option

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Okay, thank you for the information !

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Infinite flight gets there info from windy though?

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Idk maybe they do

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I doubt that, not really an easy service to copy

Probably just take meters and multiply the wind speeds as you go up in altitude

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Sir I am not European so what is a meter?

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Sorry I meant metars from airports not meters

Im American too. Idk what tf a meter is!!1

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Lol now i know as i’m in France 😂

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Ok important point, Windy is just an interface to view various weather models and live data. A very versatile, easily accessible one, but just a delivery method.

As for what weather model Infinite Flight actually uses, I have wondered this for a while and haven’t found a great answer. It’s probably buried in some post somewhere, so if anyone knows, I would love to know. It is also possible that Infinite Flight is not just importing from a global model and is taking in lots of information from METARs, upper air data, etc., and then blending it together. This, though, either means we are probably not getting a super high-resolution or quality weather layer, or Infinite Flight should stop making mobile simulators and go into the weather modeling business.

For what it’s worth, I know MSFS has a deal with Metoblue, who is now owned by Windy, to supply them with global meteorological data.

You can’t quite do this. To a certain point, you can; there are formulas to calculate wind speed change with height, but they require a lot of information about atmospheric conditions, or you have to assume a lot of things. The wind profile power law, and the log wind profile are probably the two main formulas if you wish to explore that. Both of those are really only applicable in the boundary layer where air is interacting with the surface. Once you are above that layer, airflow is assumed to be geostrophic, which means it is flowing parallel to the isobars. Unless there are different weather conditions at different heights (common), it doesn’t really change speed with altitude. Also, as a little quirk of all this, since it is now geostrophic, it is now flowing in a different direction. Anyway, before I go off on meteorology too much, surface observations do not directly correlate to winds aloft. From a purely wind speed and direction perspective, what happens in the boundary layer (first couple thousand feet) and after are fundamentally different because of the surface friction.

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I have wondered about this, too, especially when you fly into airports that do not have METARs: How does determine weather condition there?

I would assume that IF would not invest in modeling weather extensively but would rather rely on some third party weather providers would have APIs to query weather given current time, latitude, longitude, and height of your aircraft… I am thinking along the line of how the weather is static in the free, solo mode.

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This is what I assume as well. Coming up with the capability to accurately interpolate all of the weather data coming into the sim, and to get all of that data, especially on the upper air data side of things, is no small feat and I was only half joking when I said Infinite Flight should stop making mobile simulators and go into weather modeling if they are doing that to a high accuracy level in-house. More likely IMO they are pulling in data from a global weather model, perhaps various regional ones as well to get higher resolution in some areas. Letting the handful of major meteorological organizations that make high-quality global models do all the data collection and interpretation, and as a side benefit getting them some amount of future forecasting to make conditions as realistic as possible between METARs. No idea what that looks like on the back side and I assume it’s a bit of a mess. I don’t think NOAA or ECMWF or any of these organizations offer a flight simulator API that cleanly and easily integrates their data into a flight simulator.

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Thank you for the amazing information, i agree with you

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One thing that I have noticed is that SimBrief’s wind prediction in your flight plan is extremely close, almost exactly the same as the wind observed in the HUD making me believe that they pull from the same source.

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So, i can write an email to SimBrief to ask them?

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Won’t hurt to ask. Report back! 😋

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Mods and devs who know the answer reading this thread: 😁🍿

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@polaris-14 @Anthony_Gulluscio @Felipe_Grajera1 @KPIT @American367 , i searched into Navigraph’s forum, in the SimBrief section. I discovered something interesting, SimBrief is using NOAA GFS cart model for replicating winds. Also, a lot of sims are using the gfs model from the Windy.com app.

Lemme search about infinite flight on their forum.

Result’s: no one talks about IF there.

A valuable hypothesis is that things said above applies to IF.

I will do an experience in a hour.

@Laura , we have a problem.

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This is an interesting website:

https://open-meteo.com/en/docs/gfs-api#latitude=52.52&longitude=13.41&current=&hourly=temperature_2m,wind_speed_10m,wind_speed_80m&timezone=GMT

There is a Python snippet to query wind and various other parameters. From my five minute look on the website, I find 10m and 80m wind, so there is also possibility that above the boundary layer, they just use a simple model?

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That’s very interesting, i need to investigate this website a little more. This is reliable, using some mathematics.

For now , I’ll begin my experience.

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