WIP (sort of tutorial to be) : Climates, applying Geoff's Cookbook at detail (some)

[Pixie]

Well, Azelor, in that case, I am really really interested in reading what you have to say about my system (see the posts below). While the whole thing makes sense to me, I am not sure at all if I am missing important aspects or not.

[Pixie]

Reaching the final stage of all this work.

Now, we start to find out the actual climates. This is based on Koppen's classification, but somehwat limited, since we only have graphical information for the extremes. The result will always need some polishing and some reviewing, so you need to understand a little bit about climates. My advice is to follow the steps below and AFTERWARDS, compare your map with Koppen's Climate Classification, at Wikipedia, to see how it compares or with real life locations in similar geographical conditions.

So, let's put our maps to use.
All it's needed now is the four maps we produced in the previous stages:
- January and July Rain Patterns
- January and July Temperature

You are going to use the magic wand a lot, sometimes in "addictive mode" (enlarging a current selection with the area under one color), sometimes in "subtractive mode" (excluding an area under a given color from the current selection) and sometimes in "intercept mode". Identifying every bit of a particular climate is a matter of fitting a number of conditions, so I'll slowly go step-by-step for the first one:

1. HOT DESERT (BWh)
- at least one of the seasons as Warm/Hot/Very Hot
- no season as Cold/Very Cold
- both seasons dry

So I need to find the areas that "fit" all these three conditions:
Looking at January Temperature map, I select all areas under dark red, red and orange (adding them).
Then I switch to July Temperature and I exclude the areas in light blue or colder from this selection.
Thirdly, using one rain pattern at a time, I intercepted the selection with the DRY areas.


This sequence of pictures shows the selection area getting smaller (the region under diagonal stripes), step by step.
instructions_for_selecting.gif

The resulting area is painted in a solid color in a separate layer. Which I name after the climate - one climate per layer (easier to adjust later, if need be).
But it wasn't all done yet for this climate. I checked January being the warmest and July could be mild, I need to repeat the process for the remaining combinations. After which I got this result:

deserts_in_palamb.gif
This is a very desertic land, I can see that now. It contains two huge deserts plus a few pockets and two small "coasts of death". But let's find out about the rest of the continent, there has to be some place where people can live and farm comfortably!

My choice of colors comes from this map.