Software
Microsoft Flight Simulator Players Ride to Hurricane Laura
This week, Microsoft Flight Simulator players have become simulated hurricanes, chasing down Hurricane Laura as it approached the US Gulf Coast. Though Texas and Louisiana prepare for what is described as a "unsurvival storm surge," real-time weather inside the Microsoft Flight Simulator is a crazy spectacle for players.
Virtual strormchasers assembled in the sky over the Gulf of Mexico to head straight to Hurricane Laura. The tests display the amazing realism in the Microsoft Flight Simulator, even as Hurricane Laura is causing serious destruction in the real world.
Players had traveled straight into the eye of the hurricane, along the outer sides, and even so high away that the aircraft had frozen and had to be de-iced.
Visual views allowed players to watch Hurricane Laura in the moments before landfall as a category 4 hurricane with 150 mph winds. YouTube users have caught the simulated experience of traveling through Hurricane Laura, demonstrating how well the storm cloud patterns are portrayed in the video.
Hurricane Laura looks impressive in Flight Simulator! pic.twitter.com/FGhsAqE2c5
— Simon Coudé (@SCoude) August 26, 2020
so i saw hurricane laura in microsoft flight simulator pic.twitter.com/bEdK64xFYS
— chris (@Modern_Chris2) August 26, 2020
Flight Simulator uses real-time weather data to chart conditions around the globe to make this possible. Microsoft has collaborated with Swiss firm Meteoblue to chart the world's weather trends. Meteoblue separates the planet into 250 million frames, each of which tracks wind speed, temperature, heat, and much more. Although the weather data was initially limited to simulated pilot airports, Flight Simulator is now replicating real-world weather events with unprecedented accuracy.
Yesterday's hurricane was very stunning to look at and our simulations were correctly forecast only days ahead, explains Mathias Müller, co-founder of Meteoblue, in an e-mail to The Verge. We are very excited that real-time weather is now part of the Flight Simulator. It was a long journey because the integration of such large volumes of data required a solution to many problems. From our end, we 'd like to include even more information and weather parameters that we've already computed for our customers and the meteoblue.com website within the game, but game-side improvements are incredibly complicated and time consuming.
