Because topography can get boring, and because climate and topography can feed back on each other, I’ve taken a bit of a detour into temperature modeling lately. Months ago I followed the Azelor / Charerg / AzureWings tutorial here and I wanted to compare the results of that to the Clima-sim method covered by Nikolai Lofving Hersfeldt which generates temperature isotherms on the basis of a very low resolution input geography.

For all of these, no attempt was made to correct for orographic temperature changes and no modification was made to the Clima-sim output to account for the influence of currents (which it ostensibly already includes). Apart from the input geography, all other Clima-sim parameters were kept at the default Earth values.

July Tutorial (left) and Clima-sim (right)
map6_july_temp_small.png climasim_july.png

The July maps have pretty remarkable agreement between the two methods and there really are only (to my eye, anyway) very minor differences. This is really neat and makes me happier than it probably should.

January Tutorial (left) and Clima-sim (right)
map6_jan_temp_small.png climasim_jan.png

For the January maps, the qualitative agreement is still pretty good, though the differences are much more pronounced. The Clima-sim maps are a bit warmer at the equator, which likely doesn’t impact all that much since it’s always going to be hot, and are also appreciably warmer at the poles. Particularly in the northern hemisphere, the 0 C isotherm is quite far north, which pushes the “C” climates far to the north and eliminates the Dfc climates in the northernmost latitudes entirely.

I’m not 100% sure what to make of this January discrepancy. Perhaps the lack of land at very high latitudes allows for much better heat transport by the oceans and so moderates the high latitude temperatures a lot. There could also just be a systematic temperature anomaly in winter that makes all of the Clima-sim output warmer than it should be. I'm going to keep messing around with this, but wanted to post these results here in case they're interesting for anyone.