StrataSim Designs launches StrataWx, a high-fidelity real-time weather engine for Microsoft Flight Simulator that flies with you.

StrataSim Designs today announced the general availability of StrataWx, a premium live-weather engine for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, with full support for MSFS 2020. StrataWx reads your aircraft's position continuously and injects real-world weather resolved for that exact point in space and time, so the sky you fly through reflects the atmosphere that is actually out there, not a coarse approximation of it.

Where most weather solutions hand the simulator a broad regional snapshot, StrataWx behaves like a dedicated meteorological co-pilot. It follows the airplane, looks ahead along the route, and renders a coherent, evolving atmosphere from the surface to the flight levels.

Who we are

StrataSim Designs is an independent flight simulation studio focused on one thing: making the simulated atmosphere feel real. StrataWx is the studio's flagship product, built for the way real flights actually encounter weather. The team builds in the open, ships frequently through an automatic update channel, and treats pilot reports from the field as the most important signal in the development loop.

What StrataWx is

StrataWx is a signed Windows desktop application paired with a lightweight in-simulator panel. Together they form a real-time weather pipeline:

1. Aggregate. Live surface observations from around the world, upper-air conditions through the whole column, and an offline worldwide airport and runway database.
2. Model. A coherent atmosphere: winds aloft, temperature and the freezing level, cloud layers and structure, visibility and fog, surface pressure, convection, turbulence, and icing. What is reported at the field is what you get at the field.
3. Inject. That atmosphere is applied to the simulator in real time, and every change is smoothed so conditions glide instead of popping.
4. Follow. As the aircraft moves, StrataWx re-resolves the weather for the new position and looks a short distance ahead along the track, so what you see is what you are about to fly into.

What makes it different

• Aircraft-following resolution. The atmosphere is computed for where the airplane actually is, continuously.
• More than one opinion. StrataWx does not stake the sky on a single source, and it tells you how much its sources agree.
• Observation-anchored, smoothly blended. A clear field reads clear, a CAVOK field reads CAVOK, and a long final no longer marches through several different skies.
• Correct winds and temperatures all the way up. Winds aloft and outside air temperature track the forecast through the upper levels, and temperature is anchored to the altitude you are flying.
• An altimeter you can trust. The injected pressure holds the reporting station's value, so the subscale reads field elevation on the ground.
• Clouds with real structure. Tops and depth come from the moisture in the air mass, decks render as smooth coherent sheets, and fog builds a real surface deck you descend into.
• Storms you can see. Fly into a convective area and the sky raises towering cumulonimbus and lightning, scaled to how close and strong the cells are.
• Felt hazards. Thermal, convective, and mechanical turbulence, structural icing, and microburst encounters.

More than live

StrataWx is not limited to right now. Historical mode replays a past date from reanalysis data. Sandbox mode lets you author conditions by hand. Hybrid mode layers an authored sky over the live picture. Every mode runs through the same smoothing pipeline.

Built for the way pilots actually fly

For virtual airlines and serious general aviation flyers, StrataWx folds weather into the dispatch workflow: a Flight Plan view with dispatch tabs and a route weather ribbon, optional route-aware weather preload, SimBrief route briefing, a generated ATIS, winds-aloft export, route file import, and historic winds export.

Beyond the simulator's built-in Live Weather

The simulator's native Live Weather is a solid baseline, and StrataWx respects it: when a user wants the sim to own the sky, StrataWx steps aside cleanly. But the built-in system is broad and coarse. It does not resolve the atmosphere for your precise position, it has no historical replay, no manual authoring, no hazard or turbulence modeling, no ATIS or dispatch integration, and no continuous, observation-anchored blending between stations.

Why we built it

For years, serious weather in the simulator meant one established add-on. We respect the road it paved. StrataWx is our answer for the current generation of the simulator: a native, modern engine that does not stake the sky on a single source, anchors temperature and pressure to the aircraft and the station the way a briefing actually works, and threads weather into flight planning. We are also honest about the platform's hard limits. No external engine, including our leading competitor, can paint discrete convective cells onto the simulator's onboard weather radar, because the simulator exposes a single global weather state to inject into. We tell you what works and what does not, and we keep pushing on everything that can be improved.

"The atmosphere is the most important character in a flight, and for too long it has been the least convincing one. StrataWx exists to fix that. We resolve the real sky for the airplane, follow it through the whole flight, and smooth every transition, so the weather stops being scenery and starts being something you fly." The StrataSim Designs team

Availability

StrataWx is available now for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 and Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020. The application is code-signed for safe installation on Windows and keeps itself current through an automatic update channel, with both stable and beta tracks. For pricing, the latest release, and documentation, visit stratawxfs.com.

About StrataSim Designs

StrataSim Designs is an independent studio building high-fidelity simulation tools, with a focus on realistic weather for Microsoft Flight Simulator. Its flagship product, StrataWx, brings aircraft-following, real-time weather to the desktop simulator, backed by transparent, community-driven development. Learn more at stratasimdesigns.com.

Ends

What changed since, added 14 August 2026

The release above is the record and stays as issued. This note is not part of it. It exists because a year-old announcement that nobody annotates becomes a set of claims a reader has no way to date.

• The build has moved on. Stable was 1.3.13 on 14 August 2026, still on the same automatic update channel with stable and beta tracks.
• Where to buy it has grown. Direct at launch, then SimMarket, and since 13 August 2026 the iniBuilds Store. See the iniBuilds release.
• We now name the competitor. "Our leading competitor" above was our house style at launch. Since 2 August 2026 we name Active Sky FS directly on this site and compare against it row by row, with a source in every row, at vs Active Sky FS.
• Two claims above we would now write more carefully. "Every change is smoothed so conditions glide instead of popping" states the mechanism as an outcome: the smoothing is real and user-adjustable, but we have open work on transitions and we no longer claim the absolute. And the sentence about the simulator's built-in Live Weather is a fair description of the platform baseline that we would today rather leave to a reader to compare for themselves. Both stand in the record, and this is the correction.
• The full list of what we do not claim lives in the press room and is maintained.