Climate help needed!

[Qwynegold]

For purposes of general world mapping, yes. Now, if you were mapping sea travel lanes or fishing resources noting counter-currents would be a good idea. Certain counter-currents can also have a disproportionate affect on local weather, but that can only be discussed individually.

Aha, maybe I'll do that later because it's not super-interesting and right now I only need enough to be able to create different biospheres and stuff.

Your new map looks really good. The only place that looks odd to me is the sea north of your eastern equatorial continent. At first glance I would expect some circular motion there. Looking a bit more deeply, however, what you have is probably as good at anything else. I really don't have a clue how that would turn out in reality.

Thanks! I made a little change to the sea you mentioned, and I think it's less fugly now. You can see the changes in the maps I'm posting now.

I made the evaporation and condensation maps now. But I confused those with high- and low-pressure areas. I should just forget about air pressure and concentrate on where water evaporates and condensates, right? As a result, these maps have a little bit of both, so I should do them over. Things that have been affected of me thinking about pressure areas I've marked with a * in the below explanations. But before I do this over I'd like to have your input so I'll know which of my thoughts have been right and which have been wrong.

I've concentrated the blue areas (evaporation or high pressure) over places of the ocean where there are warm currents, because warm water should be likely to evaporate. I've also placed blue areas on land between th 15th and 30th latitudes*, because in those real life weather maps I posted earlier there seemed to be high pressure areas around deserts. I think I've read something in Wikipedia too about deserts making air flow upwards a lot because it's so hot. In the summer I've given deserts on the northern hemisphere more priority over deserts in the southern hemisphere*, because I read on WP that the sun is at zenith on the tropic of cancer during the summer solstice. The situation is reversed during the winter*. But it doesn't make sense with evaporation in the desert, so that's why I'm thinking I should forget about air pressure. In the global scale I've also focused on making a lot of blue zones in the north in summer, and in the south in winter, because the weather is warmer then.

Red areas (condensation or low pressure) I've placed a little bit further away from the blue areas, and on elevated ground, because it's supposed to rain around mountains. Some red areas I've placed in the ocean, like the two in the NW corner of the winter map. I imagine that they get their moisture from the nearby blue areas, but when that moist air travels past a certain point in the north, it rains down because it's too cold there.

For both red and blue areas, I've avoided the equator because the intertropical convergence zone is supposed to be there, and that's supposed to do weird things. According to the WP article air is supposed to rise up there. But it also seems like it's supposed to rain a lot there, so I don't understand which is supposed to be true.

The equinoxes I haven't made yet. To me it seems like the spring equinox should be identical to the autumn equinox. Because it's the same temperature/tilt of the axis towards the sun, right? Marking the actual winds I'll save for later when this other stuff has been cleared.

[Jeff_Wilson63]

I'm afraid you've reached the limits of my knowledge. I don't know what makes for good evaporation and condensation zones. I would say that you have too many zones on your maps, but that's intuition speaking. I don't have anything to back it up.

Keep in mind, however, that these zones move. They move, shrink, grow, break apart, etc., etc. The equinox maps allow you to think about exactly how things move in general.

As regards the equator, as the saturated air rises, it cools, and thus precipitates out. Once that saturated air reaches a certain point, however, it stops rising and thus stops cooling because of altitude. Moving away from the equator it starts cooling again because of latitude, but needs to travel a fair distance before it starts precipitating out again.

[Greason Wolfe]

Perhaps these links will be useful to your intended goal;

http://www.compulink.co.uk/~morven/w...t/climate.html (Climate Cookbook)

http://www.blueplanetbiomes.org/climate.htm (World Climate Zones)

http://www.runet.edu/~swoodwar/CLASS...omes/main.html (Major Biomes of the World)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biome (Wikipedia Biomes page)

GW

[zenram]

Wow, this is gonna be of use for me too. XD

[Qwynegold]

http://www.compulink.co.uk/~morven/w...t/climate.html (Climate Cookbook)

Oh huh, that guy has a section about conworlding too. Thanks, I think I'll manage it now.

[Qwynegold]

I'm in the middle of working with this stuff, but wanted to ask everyone what they think of the climate that I've created so far. I have maps for december, april, june and october.

Blue areas are high pressure and red areas are low pressure. The red line in the middle is the intertropical convergence zone, and the other two are the polar fronts. The blue lines are the subtropical high-pressure zones. The turquoise arrows are moist winds and the yellow ones are dry or medium-dry winds.

I've only worked on the summer and winter northern hemisphere with the winds so far. When it comes to the high and low pressure areas, the spring and fall southern hemisphere is still unfinished.

The last map shows all seasons at once. Some of the pressure zones move around, as can see from lines that gradually go from low to high opacity, and some of them just form and disappear.

[Jeff_Wilson63]

Looks very nice to me.

[Qwynegold]

Really? Then I'll continue like I've done so far...

Thx for the rep! I repped you too, but it seems like it doesn't count until I have kazillions of post and rep points.

[Qwynegold]

I've completed the pressure areas and winds and stuff. I've added arrows to the pressure areas to show what direction they are moving towards. D means that it'll dissolve. I think I have a pretty good picture of where the rain is deposited, but I have a few questions.

At places where arrows merge, would that mean that the wind is going faster, because there is more power added? Or would it just mean that the air is more dense there, without the speed being affected? And the opposite for places where arrows split?

There's high pressure area on each pole. Is there only a small quantity of air coming from there, because it's all emanating from a single spot? Or is the air on the poles just super-concentrated, getting thinner as it spreads away from the pole? (I made fewer arrows on the polar areas than elsewhere because one must take the map projection into consideration. When the map is put on a sphere, the arrows at the polar areas will get really close together. I used a lot of arrows around the polar low pressure areas though, just so it would be easy to see how the air is moving around there.)

Does anything special happen when a dry wind and a moist wind merge?

[su_liam]

When a cold, dry wind from the polar regions meets a hot, moist wind from the tropics a temperate cyclone results, twisting into a large comma-shaped mass of clouds, creating lots of rain and dragging more moist, hot air up from the tropics.