Tom,
We currently have some pretty thick smoke (from forest fires up north) affecting our skies. The local airport is reporting visibility of 5km (3.1 miles). WXSim is reporting clear conditions, and it is clear above the smoke, but I wanted to verify which settings I should manually change to account for the haze. You can really see the effects on the pictures on my webpage.
On the main form I think I should be turning autohaze off and then manually changing the Haze Setting to get the same visibility as the airport.
Is there anything else I should be changing/adjusting?
Thanks,
Carl
http://cfinlay.info/weather/wxindex.php
Really interesting question! You can manually set the haze (or let the METAR of even solar radiation data if you have a solar sensor) try to estimate it. However, if you expect it to persist, then turn OFF Estimated Haze (on the bottom part of the Data Entry form) and then that haze will hold steady through the forecast.
Depending on how high up the smoke is, the visibility figures from METAR may or may not give reasonable results. The ones from the solar radiation data may be more accurate then. You can also enter it manually, going by the descriptions accessible by clicking on the blue caption.
Tom