Weather Maker Professional 4

By Andrew Herd (14 August 2006)

have reviewed many FS utilities and if they have a collective fault, it is that the interface tends to be less developed than the product itself. Most of these apps are developed by people who understand the problem they are trying to solve down to the last dot and comma, but don't attach anywhere near the same priority to making things easy for the user. Weather Maker Pro 4 is the exception to the rule and I have rarely come across an FS utility with a prettier interface, or one that is so easy to use. If the rest of the product was as good, it would be a killer app.

Everyone reading this will be familiar with Flight Simulator's weather interface, which has been revised several times over the years, but has never quite gotten to the stage where it could be described as easy to use. Drag and drop is hardly a new concept, but it hasn't got into Flight Simulator yet, with the result that - assuming you know how to get to the advanced weather dialog - it takes a quite a while to get your head around the somewhat extraordinary logic that lies behind it. At least I think there is logic lying behind it, because it can be hard to tell when you are trying to figure out which cloud layer is made of which type of cloud. And then again, after reading all that stuff about how powerful the weather engine is and seeing it laying down believable frontal weather via the built-in live weather feature, it can be hard to figure out why it didn't occur to anyone to stick in a facility to create fronts yourself. As it stands, the FS2004 weather engine is an incredibly powerful program in its own right, but the internal interface resticts you to creating a single set of weather conditions centered on your location, unless you choose to rely on downloadable weather, over which, by definition, you have little influence. Okay, there are weather themes and if you are prepared to dive into the SDK you can create your own and you can save real weather patterns that you happen to like, but that is more or less the end of it.

The problem for anyone with a PPL - or anyone who has looked out the window of an airliner - is that we know real weather isn't like that. If you live somewhere that has weather, as opposed to slow seasonal change, then you will be familiar with the idea of frontal systems comprised of warm front, followed by warm sector, followed by a cold front, followed by good vis and clear skies until the whole process repeats. With all its sophistication, FS2004 ends up giving you a snapshot, rather than an evolving view of the natural progression of weather systems. It isn't supposed to be like that, but even downloading METARs (weather actuals from airfield reporting stations), the weather in FS2004 has a habit of proceding in fits and starts. One moment you are in thick cloud, the next it is clear, then the next download arrives and you are back in cloud and so on. Fairly inevitably, developers have given quite a lot of thought about how to deal with this and Weather Maker Professional is one take on the solution.

The app is an 84 Mb download from the Pilot Shop and a condition for installation is that you have FSUIPC 3.5 or higher installed and also the .net Framework 1.0, 1.1 from Microsoft. The software is protected by a key code that has to be entered during installation, the only gotcha being that the program must be installed in \CalibreSoftware\WMPRO4, or it won't work - you can change the drive letter, but any attempt to install in the \program file\ tree is doomed to failure. The 'render to texture' option in FS2004's display settings needs to be unchecked or you may experience periodic flashing during update cycles, but apart from that, everything else can be left as it is. The installation creates a new Weather Maker program group containing links to a very good html manual, an icon for the app itself and the developer's website.

Using WMP in anger requires FS2004 to be running, as the program needs to pick up the location of your plane and that you have cleared all the FS weather by loading the 'clear all weather' theme. When you first fire up the app, you are greeted with a really nicely designed screen which lays out all the options on a series of buttons, as seen in the screenshot top left. Before doing anything else, you need to visit the config page, which lets you setup weather variables as you wish, including enabling up and down drafts, the level of turbulence you require, thermals, hail and even what kind of startup music you want played when WMP boots - there is a shot of this at top right.

Hitting the 'current real weather' button takes you to a page that allows you to load weather; but first you have to select which global area you are in from a drop down dialog. After that, WMP lets you look at the satellite view, seen above left, and to examine everything else from precipitation to icing, although some of the regional databases used can't provide all the options. Once you have checked out the situation, all you need to do is choose the interval at which weather is downloaded, select a time difference from the current hour (you can load the weather as it was up to eleven hours previously) and click OK and make your flight. There is a pause as the weather is loaded, but it isn't that much longer than it takes to load the weather using the default FS2004 method and once your flight is in progress, updates proceed more or less transparently. The weather source is different to the one Microsoft use, which is Jeppesen and interesting though it may seem, you get slightly different weather, though in my experience neither has a monopoly on the truth, at least as far as FS2004 is concerned.

Wheeling my trusty Saber out of the garage, I took off from EGNV and after a brisk climb to ten thousand feet, was glad I hadn't taken off in the Cub. Although I could see plenty of gaps in the cloud out of my window (about thirty miles from the airport), WMP had laid on the most spectacular front I had ever seen in FS2004 and after chasing through the hole between the two cloud layers you can see in the above left shot, I opened the throttle and climbed to FL300, at which point I still had cloud towering above me. The reason the clouds look so spectacular in the sim is that I am using Flight Environment and on this occasion, it delivered the most convincing cold front I have ever seen in Flight Simulator. There then followed a delay in writing the review while I flew around and took in how real the sky looked - which was much better than it did using FS2004's built-in weather, partly because by chance the WMP METAR gave a more impressive sky and partly because WMP forced more cloud layers.

At that point, you could have called me a convert, but emboldened by the results I got with the live download, I decided to create some of my own weather. This, WMP allows you to do, using the 'dynamic weather scape' option, shown in the right hand shot in the second row from the top. Using this dialog, you set up the temperature, dewpoint, atmospheric pressure (in mb), wind speed and wind direction, and then place the weather you want to see on screen by choosing from a row of icons above the map. Click through on the map thumbnail to get a view of the entire dialog.

It has to be said that dynamic weather creation is not the best feature of WMP. For a start, the program lets you create overall conditions which are fundamentally in conflict with the weather features you place on screen, but that is a minor point compared to the fact the program only lets you create cold fronts parallel to meridians of longitude and warm fronts along parallels of latitude - in other words, warm fronts are always horizontal and cold fronts are always vertical, like they are not in real life. There is no facility for slewing them around to different angles and neither does the dynamic weather screen allow you to undo any particular action - if you get just one thing wrong you have to start over. Beware also of creating anything more complex than a single front with a few associated features, or it will take forever to load into FS2004, but the flip side of the coin is that once you have generated a weather system, you can save and use it again and again.

The screenshot above left shows you what a warm front created using this method in WMP looks like. Underwhelming is the word best associated with it - the cloud tops are well below ten thousand feet, whereas a warm front is a serious item that extends all the way up to the tropopause. In addition, the only kind of cloud created in the sim is cumulus, with a smidge of very thin high stuff, when a warm front is announced by a long, high, forward extension of cirro and altostratus, before treating you to lowering nimbostratus (that's the thick gray stuff that rains on you all day), dragging after it a 'warm sector' which generates a lowish cloud base of continuous stratocumulus/stratus. OK, I would settle for not having the warm sector and even go without the herald cirrus, but making warm fronts that can be overflown in the Cub is ridiculous. The real thing is something you avoid like the plague in a light aircraft, because they can do you serious harm - even cold fronts are no joke, although those sometimes have layers of clear air that you can use to worm your way through - rather like the hole you can see in the downloaded weather in the third row of screenshots.

The final option lets you create 'random weather'. This would be a neat idea, were it better executed. On the positive side of the balance, the interface couldn't be simpler: all you have to do is set the temperature and the moisture bars to the required level and hit the 'generate' button. This brings up a suggested weather theme that you can send to FS2004 by clicking the load button. The help file says that the weather feature can be clicked and dragged left or right, but when I tried this, the results were very variable, with the icon group jumping all over the place, until I gave up and settled for a compromise. Oddly enough, this screen is the one place where you can get a vertically placed warm front, but you can't use it to get a horizontally placed one, or any position in between. If you don't like the weather that the randomiser serves up, just click the generate button again and a different set will be created - in practice the connection between the type of weather you get and the temperature conditions you have set is pretty loose, but that is an advantage if you want variety, which is what this dialog is all about. Again, frontal systems created using this method are disappointingly weedy and WMP would be vastly improved if the developers could beef them up several hundred per cent. Then again, if you want really severe weather, there is always the option to create a hurricane...

Overall, WMP is a useful little app if you want to download weather from a different source to the Jepp system. WMP will also let you generate random weather and - where the weather databases it uses support it - get SIGMETS and view satellite charts. It promises the ability to create frontal systems, but in practice it isn't there yet; if the way the program worked FS weather was only up to the standard of the interface, it would be a very nice little app. The idea is a good one, but in many areas, WMP needs further work.