Testing Live Weather and Winter Wonders Along the Way

In Microsoft Flight Simulator you can work your way through all kinds of icy scenarios.

Friday, February 09, 2024 at 07:39 PM ET

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This could be an ad for Air Canada. What a scenery feast. Partially frozen waters with glaciers and snow-covered cliffs. Unbelievably beautiful. [Courtesy: Peter James]

Key Takeaways:

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 (MSFS2020) provides a highly accurate and immersive live winter weather experience, consistently matching real-world conditions as verified by tools like ForeFlight.
The author demonstrated MSFS2020's realism through a series of challenging flights across diverse North American winter landscapes, including Cleveland's lake-effect snow, the windy Dakotas, mountainous British Columbia, and Alaska.
MSFS2020 successfully depicts detailed weather phenomena, realistic terrain effects, and advanced avionics, offering an adventurous and lifelike simulation of winter flying.

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With winter gripping most of the country, it’s one of my most favorite times to sim fly. Actually, that’s a lie. All seasons are fun. However, winter does hold that special, adventurous spirit the other seasons sometimes seem to lack.

I am often inspired by the real locations and weather I experience when I am on a real work trip. With ForeFlight by my side, it’s fun to test the realism of the sims and how they’re interpreting live weather worldwide. Both X-Plane 12 (XP12) and Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 (MSFS2020) do a pretty good job of keeping up with it and both have shown continual improvements. It seems each month the message forums are showcasing live weather questions, observations, frustrations, and praise.