Here are some initial thoughts on Koppen Climates. Lines of latitude are in 15-degree increments (this is a Mercator projection that only covers to 57-degrees north and south).
Frankly, a map of biomes like the Hodridge scheme or like this is probably more practical and useful than Koppen climates, but it seems to be traditional to do the Koppen thing. I'll probably make a biome map later, and the Koppen climates will help me on that.
There are a lot of landforms that don't really have perfect analogues on Earth, so I made a lot of stuff up. For example, my huge Himalaya-like mountains are on the equator, so I used the equatorial Andes as a model for them somewhat, and made some SWAGs. (Actually they're not quite Himalaya-scale; the really tall mountains are in Ishtar.) A lot of my continents don't have a large north-south mountain range as in the Americas or Himalayan rainshadow like Asia, so I'm not sure how the east-coast and west-coast climates meet in higher latitudes without one.
My large Amazon-like Af rainforest is in eastern Ovda, since that's the only large chunk of tropical land on an east coast right on the equator. (Equatorial Phoebe is small in comparison.) I made eastern Atla somewhat similar, though.Generally, since so much of my land is in the tropics there is a LOT of Af, Am, and As.
So, I guess I'm making a jungle/desert world...
Ulfrun/Atla is a rough analogue of sub-Saharan Africa. Thus, that enormous BWh desert largely covering Zhibek and Artemis is a Sahara-equivalent. (There are no large mountain ranges to keep that desert from just cutting all the way across the continent.)
Eistla will be an Australia-equivalent. I may change the Umay-ene climate a bit and make it my Madagascar biome.
There is no good Europe-equivalent with an aberrantly high-latitude Cwa climate, unless it's Hathor and western Themis... but I was going to make Themis/Phoebe my South American biome, and make Beta my North American biome. (Ishtar is probably more like a Canada/Scandinavia bastard child.)
The only true India-like monsoon is that bit in western Thetis; the other Am climates technically meet criteria- like most of the the Amazon- but aren't the intense and brief raging torrent of the Indian Ocean monsoon.
This is all just preliminary, to help me make other decisions such as which low spots to fill as lakes and which to leave as endorheic basins, deciding where the big rivers will be, etc. Nonetheless, if anyone has any criticisms, fire away. My eyes were crossing in a lot of spots, so I'm sure that I have some egregious idiocy here, somewhere.
I'm still working on my newer maps that will show the poles as well. This is important, because there is a lot more of Ishtar down there, and that might end up being an important place. (I have to think of new names for these landforms...)
I also found GTDR data from the Magellan mission, which is topographical data on Venus. I thought I'd run it through some manipulations in Wilbur when I get a chance and see what pops out. Unfortunately, one pixel is 4.6km, so it isn't terribly detailed, and there are a lot of holes and artifacts in the data, but I still think it can help me figure some things out.
Hmm... I guess that I have a Wilbur question... given data like that can Wilbur for instance double the number of pixels (to 2.3km/px) by extrapolating elevations or somesuch? (I have yet to download Wilbur- I have to dual-boot some sort of Windows on my laptop, first.) I wouldn't mind trying to do a nice job with Wilbur on some small area, like Tellus or Eistla, or maybe Beta. (I understand that Wilbur works best on smaller scales.)
After sangi39 mentioned this inspired study on his Yantas thread I started looking around to see if there was any way I could run my world through the HadCM3L climate model, but I don't think that there is. Unless, of course, someone here happens to work for the UK Met Office or the Hadley Center...
A final point: I was going to name this world Sypherion, that being a fictional cognate of cytherean, which means "of or regarding the planet Venus." But then I found Max's map of the city of Yphyrion, and now I don't feel so clever...
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