[Top 5] Best Skyrim Weather Mods

Updated:

24 Apr 2020

5. Vividian EnB

TESV: Skyrim - Vividian ENB - Vivid Weathers Version Showcase

Introduction: This mod is a massive visual overhaul that affects things like weather, lighting, clouds and colors. It adds things like new particle effects for snowflakes, enhanced light rays and more in an attempt to make Skyrim more aesthetic.

Points of Interest:

Vividian ENB: The mod comes with an ENB that focuses on tings like color, saturation, and volumetric rays. It increases the overall quality of Skyrim’s graphics.
Extended Weather: The mod comes with an optional “Vivid Clouds and Fog” module. It replaces fogs, streams, smoke and spays with higher quality versions and also increases cloud movement speed. The aim is to make the weather a bit more succinct and detailed.
Highly Compatible: The mod is noted to be compatible with other popular weather mods like Climates of Tamriel, Pure Weather, Purity, RCRN and more. This means that if this mod is not enough to enhance your gameplay, you can go ahead and download another mod to enhance it further.

Get the mod HERE and HERE (for Special Edition)

4. Purity

TES V - Skyrim Mods: Purity

Introduction: This visual mod alters all of Skyrim’s exteriors, and is an amalgam of visual and immersion mods that the mod author has created in the past. This includes version of Pure Waters, Pure Waterfalls and Pure Weathers.

Points of Interest:

Additional Weathers and Natural Lighting: More than 50 new weather variations have been added, allowing for a variety of cloudy, sunny, rainy, snowy and foggy days. This variation combines nicely with the new exterior lighting that seeks to enhance your visual experience.
Enhanced Waters and Waterfalls: The water in Skyrim has been almost entirely redone, with the transparent liquid now sporting new textures, colors, reflections and more. These apply to almost every lake, stream and waterfall Skyrim has to offer. In particular, the mod has made note of a few “wonderfalls” that can be found in game that are noted for their exceptional uniqueness and beauty.
Optional Landscape Textures: If the added water textures are not enough, the mod also comes with an optional set of landscape textures which can replace vanilla ones. These land textures that enhance the detail for soil, rocks and other land formations were built so it pairs nicely with Purity without standing out.

Get the mod HERE

3. Vivid Weathers

Skyrim Mods: Vivid Weathers - Visual and Weather Overhaul + ENB

Introduction: Combining features from several weather and visual mods like Climates of Tamriel and Real Skyrim Snowflakes, Vivid Weathers overhauls the colors and weathers and Skyrim in an effort to create stunning visual effects for Skyrim without an ENB.

Points of Interest:

More Weather Variation: The mod includes over 500+ weather variations. This includes weathers for snow, fog, rain, blizzards, thunderstorms and more.
Enhancements to Fog, Snowflakes, and Storms: The mod also alters several weather effects. Storms have new sounds to make them more realistic. Fogs are now volumetric and can either be thick or thin. And snowflakes are actually their own particle effect that can be seen.
New Sky Textures: The mod adds over 150 new cloud textures, immersive sunrises and sunsets, new star and galaxy textures and more. All to make the sky as beautiful as possible.

Get the mod HERE and HERE (for Special Edition)

2. Climates of Tamriel-Weather-Lighting-Audio

Skyrim Mod Sanctuary 36 : Project Reality - Climates of Tamriel (Weather and lighting mod)

Introduction: This mod replaces all of vanilla Skyrim’s lighting and weather with its own unique and beautifully styled variants. It adds more weather variations, lighting effects, custom textures and more.

Points of Interest:

Weather Variations: The mods adds hundreds of weather variations that can range from sunny, cloudy, stormy, snow blizzards, foggy and more. In addition, the mod also adds enhanced sunrises and sunsets in order to really highlight the mod’s weather additions.
New Effects, Textures and Sounds: Lighting has been revamped to help create violent thunderstorms and volumetric fog. These new effects are paired with new thunder sounds, interior rain sounds and new cloud textures. The result is a more immersive set of weathers, with thunderstorms now feeling a bit dangerous and thick fogs providing a more sinister atmosphere.
Optional Modules: Alongside the main mod are several optional plugins that players can use to customize their atmospheric experience. This includes plugins for interiors, dungeons and nighttime.

Get the mod HERE and HERE (for Special Edition)

1. Cathedral Weathers and Seasons

Cathedral Weathers Skyrim Special Edition + ENB

Introduction: Only available on Skyrim Special Edition, Cathedral Weathers is a massive visual and weather overhaul mod that affects weather, lighting, fog, clouds, audio and more. Built from mods like Obsidian Weathers and taking lessons from Aequinoctium, this mod seeks to provide the best of what the current modding community has to offer for visuals.

Points of Interest:

Massive Customization: A good deal of effects and visuals can be customized either through MCM or a new “Cathedral Meditation” power. It allows the player to customize brightness, saturation and bloom for indoor and outdoor areas.
Seasons: This mod includes the traditional four seasons and a rainy season. These seasons are distributed across Tamriel's twelve month calendar and alters the probability for certain weather types depending on the season. Meaning that your summers are more likely to be hot and your winters are more likely to be frigid.
Compact and Stable Design: The mod was designed so it doesn’t take too much out of FPS and is unlikely to stabilize the game with installation/destabilization. Which, given the size and scope for the mod, is quite impressive.

Get the mod HERE

What are ENBs?

When searching visual mods you will see the word ENB pop up alot. ENBs are essentially post-processing modifications that can affect the visuals or graphics of a game. Think of it as a layer of code that comes after the base game code so it comes out looking completely different. Code-paint, as it were.

ENBs allow mod authors to alter lighting, shadows and other visual effects. But keep in mind that the game’s base visuals were built so they could reasonably run on the platforms of their time. Because ENBs essentially builds past these limitations, this means their performance is dependent on RAM space, video card quality and other factors. As such, ENBs can potentially be taxing to computers who don’t have enough processing power. So it is highly recommended that modders carefully evaluate the capabilities of their computer before downloading an ENB to their game.