The great reclimatization

[zompist]

As part of the work on the Planet Construction Kit, I decided to acquire and apply a better understanding of climate zones to Almea. But before commiting to it I thought I'd put it up here so the climatically aware can offer corrections.



http://www.almeopedia.com/images/6/62/Almea-climate.jpg

This does not take the Zone of Fire into account at all. I have also not yet adjusted river systems.

Almea's continents do not impede the flow of water between poles and equator, so I'm figuring it is not in an ice age (not even an interglacial). Thus no ice caps on Palthuknen and a slightly wider rain forest zone.

The most spectacular change is a hell of a lot more deserts— in particular, the Rau jungle became a desert! Much of Curym is affected too.

I've always thought of Verduria as Mediterranean in climate, but this doesn't really work. I considered reversing the rotation of the planet but decided against it. It's subtropical now (i.e. much like the southern US). Xengiman then becomes humid continental (i.e. more like the northern US).

In Arcél, there's a good deal less rain forest. Téllinor now has a much less attractive climate!

Does all this affect the history? Yes, mostly by changing the nature of the steppe zones. Probably the western barbarians will live mostly in what is now the Western Wild. I've been planning a remake of the Historical Atlas anyway.

Take-home lesson: it's always best to plan a conworld as an entire planet. Back when I had only the map of eastern Ereláe it was too tempting to throw in just about every climate known, which is why the rain forest zone extended too far south.

[Soap]

I like this. I can tell you put a lot of work into it. However, as you might have guessed from the fact that I don't post in this forum much, I'm coming here to nitpick about something. I notice the colors in the legend key don't seem to match up perfectly with those on the map; in particular the Rainforest and Monsoon colors are different enough that I'm not clear on which is intended to be which. From context I would guess the one that's used more often is the rainforest, but if this is not an Earthlike planet all assumptions based on Earth are out. "Subtropical" and "marine" are also very close in color.

[zompist]

Good points. I changed the colors a bit. You might have to reload the page to see them.

[rotting bones]

I'm confused. This is a purely theoretical exercise for the Planet Construction Kit, right? (bump)

[the duke of nuke]

Whoa, this is a big revision!
Certainly Nan and Téllinor will look a lot different afterwards, and Kowon looks to be on shaky ground (a pity ). Also, why would there not be barbarians in the Barbarian Plain? To my untrained eye it still looks like a good steppe region.

And how much time do you think it will take you to redo the whole Atlas?

[con quesa]

Unfortunately I am not a climactic expert and can't comment much. In fact I'd be interested in knowing what sorts of resources you did use for things like figuring out which currents go where.

What do you mean by the label "monsoon"? What sorts of vegetation, lifestyle, and the like does that imply?

I seem to recall some discussion of Xengiman, Skouras and (especially) Gurdagor, with the idea that they would actually be far colder and more marginal than could support the civilizations that they do. I think you had the idea that there was a Gulf Stream-like warm current moderating the climate, but I remember people doubting whether such a current could actually work there (and even if it could how much it would affect Gurdagor anyway), and in any case I don't see a warm current on the map, but a cold one. Seems like the southern sea would end up more like Hudson Bay than the Baltic. And obviously that would really change a whole lot of what you've come up with for Eretald's history.

[zompist]

The purple arrow is warm, not cold, so it should warm up Skouras. (There's a cold current helping keep western Luduyn cold, though.)

[zompist]

A monsoon area is a slightly less dense rain forest with a pronounced wet and dry season. The prevailing winds actually reverse between seasons.

(Basically you're liable to get monsoons when the equator is oceanic and there's a continent not far north or south of it.)

[rotting bones]

Whoa, this is a big revision!

You mean a complete overhaul. Nearly everything besides the finalized grammars will have to change, from crops, to the wealth of nations, to clothes, architectural styles and background scenery. Will Verdurians have enough energy to get so much done in the sweltering heat of the tropics? Do Almeopedia editors have the energy to basically start over from a half-complete wiki? I can only make out a whitish dot in it's place, but do you realize that Flora just became a European fairyland + island paradise? Hula Flaids!

[the duke of nuke]

Whoa, this is a big revision!

You mean a complete overhaul. Nearly everything besides the finalized grammars will have to change, from crops, to the wealth of nations, to clothes, architectural styles and background scenery. Will Verdurians have enough energy to get so much done in the sweltering heat of the tropics? Do Almeopedia editors have the energy to basically start over from a half-complete wiki? I can only make out a whitish dot in it's place, but do you realize that Flora just became a European fairyland + island paradise? Hula Flaids!

I envisage it as being quite like Cuba with this overhaul. Maybe there were flaids in the revolution who had berets and stylish beards and rode around Ereláe on thoroughbred horses with black leather tack.
Just a thought.

[Yiuel Raumbesrairc]

Nitpick : Continental climates stick to inland regions. If there's any continental climate bordering the sea, there's a problem somewhere.

Now...

It seems to me that Nan would look pretty much like Indonesia/Vietnam/China/Japan. It's the only place where the strong Equatorial current would be deviated strongly towards the north.

I've found a very interesting image which may help you much. I don't know if you found that source, but it shows interesting details about climate.

First thing, it would seem that, in general, the ocean currents do not influence climate on a global scale. You'll have an equatorial band, then a tropical band, then a temperate band, then a cold band, then a polar band.

Eastern Erelae : What you mark as a steppe between Eretald and Xengiman would look more like the Canadian Prairies than like Arizona. That is, it will not be steppes. But then, look at your orography. The Canadian Praries would look more like Eastern Europe if it wasn't for the Rockies. But you don't have an equivalent; the Jet Stream that would flow there has no montain to block it, so you'd have a long green plain that would end on the eastern side of Xengiman, in Cuoli. Verduria would look like the region around the Gulf of Mexico; wet, warm and rich, and further inland it would look like the Mississippi valley, except wetter (because of the Jet Stream that would blow depressions over the region). You might want a Verdurian and Kebri word for Hurricane, they'll have tons of them.

---

I probably could add more, but these are only feelings that I have from what I have been able to read. The biggest problem is really pluviometry and how your currents would work.

The currents are important to see where the sea might temperate cold or hot climates. But your equatorial band is blocked only by northern Erelae, which would cause a current to go south towards Verduria, warming the place, and north towards Palthuknen, and by Curym, causing a current to go along Neinuoi south, and north following Curym as a Kuroshio. There are no polar continent, but Palthuknen is Greenland-like enough. But your planet is warmer, which might make all ice disappear anyways, but this would mean that Mnese and most of Lydun would be warm enough to be temperate, if only of a cold type (Quebec).

Make a map of the winds, they bring lots of water overland. This is why I don't think the Barbarian plain would be a steppe, more like western Russia.

[Yiuel Raumbesrairc]

Whoa, this is a big revision!

You mean a complete overhaul. Nearly everything besides the finalized grammars will have to change, from crops, to the wealth of nations, to clothes, architectural styles and background scenery. Will Verdurians have enough energy to get so much done in the sweltering heat of the tropics? Do Almeopedia editors have the energy to basically start over from a half-complete wiki? I can only make out a whitish dot in it's place, but do you realize that Flora just became a European fairyland + island paradise? Hula Flaids!

I could imagine Flora as being plagued by hurricanes. They're right where hurricanes would easily developp on Almea (the other places being along the Kereminth coastal area and Neinuoi).

[rotting bones]

I envisage it as being quite like Cuba with this overhaul. Maybe there were flaids in the revolution who had berets and stylish beards and rode around Ereláe on thoroughbred horses with black leather tack.
Just a thought.

Hats and cloaks are improbable for a native population in the tropics. I see them as a laissez-faire tribe of half-naked innocents with stirring rituals involving flaid sacrifice and cannibalism, preyed upon by hordes of nefarious Kebreni pirates who use their pristine isle as a seat of operations. Or if Flaids are really the end product of a genetic experiment by the mermaids to make humanity less immoral as I've always suspected, then it's possible that they maintain a respectable port city like Port Royal. (which everyone knows is really a cesspit of vices)

I could imagine Flora as being plagued by hurricanes. They're right where hurricanes would easily developp on Almea (the other places being along the Kereminth coastal area and Neinuoi).

Yep, easily rebuilt bamboo huts would do the trick. A nice mother volcano or two wouldn't go amiss in this facet of the multiverse either.

PS. Ever seen a Japanese straw raincoat? Maybe the Flaids use something like those to deal with the unceasing rain.

PPS. This is really great! I can't believe zompist has finally seen the light and turned Almea into a Monkey IslandTM universe!

[bulbaquil]

Nitpick : Continental climates stick to inland regions. If there's any continental climate bordering the sea, there's a problem somewhere.

I think the "humid continental" climate he's referring to is really more like east-coast temperate (Köppen Dfa), not necessarily the actual interior climates.

[zompist]

Yes, humid continental refers to D?a and D?b. (I don't find the subdivisions very useful.) They do border the sea in North America and China.

Yiuel, you're probably right about the Barbarian Plain. Though, what if there were mountains in the west to block the winds?

rotting ham, I think you're confusing tropics with subtropics. The southern US or south China are examples. The switch from Mediterranean to Subtropical isn't so much a matter of heat as of rainfall.

[rotting bones]

rotting ham, I think you're confusing tropics with subtropics. The southern US or south China are examples. The switch from Mediterranean to Subtropical isn't so much a matter of heat as of rainfall.

The elevation, surrounding coastlines and mountain ranges matter a lot. Kolkata is just barely subtropical. Compare the humidity, temperature and rainfall in South US, China, the East Indian plains and Upper Burma. Eretald lies at the apex of a bay facing the equator like Bengal and Burma. It even faces the wind like Bengal.

Never mind, I knew it was too good to be true. So how about a simple inhabited island that looks like Iceland or Easter Island because it has been deforested by annual hurricanes? (like the Yucatan) That way Flaids can still be civilized Irreanists, but they'd be depressed optimists and create a suitably twitchy and embittered culture obsessed with tribal fetishes.

[brandrinn]

Continental climates on the sea are fine. Korea is surrounded by water on three sides, but still has the huge variations of temperature and rainfall characteristic of continental climates.

As for monsoons, this is a tricky issue. There are two types of monsoon. Scratch that, there are many types of monsoon. The rule of oceanic equator, with land at ten to twenty degrees, is only a small part of the story. The North American monsoon grabs water from the ocean nowhere near the equator and dumps it in the temperate latitudes. The Asian monsoon also operates both in the tropics and in more temperate latitudes as far north as Sendai and Pyongyang. The main driver is, as you know, catabatic winds caused by heat discrepancies between land and ocean. This happens most effectively when you have a very large landmass (the threshold on Earth seems to be about 15 million sqkm) between ten and sixty degrees latitude. The model you're using may be based on the African monsoon, which admittedly works differently and breaks most of the "rules" of the Asian monsoon.

Other questions: What is the logic of the steppe climate in northeastern Erelae? Do you really think the rainfall would be low enough? And you know you're gonna have to change the very southernmost parts of Erelae to Tundra, right? With a circumpolar current, everything below south of sixty degrees will be tundra, and most everything south of 50-55 will be taiga. The northern hemisphere on Earth is a misleading comparison here, as the ocean currents work differently and at different latitudes. You still seem to believe as strongly in that warm current as you did when you first made Gurdago, but alas, with the winds at that latitude, that pidly warm current (not even coming from the equator, being recycled mostly from the west coast of Uytai) is going to have no effect west of eastern Skouras.

constructive solution
Since the "real" climate of Erelae is terrible (Verduria is no longer Mediterranean, Xurno is just gone), maybe you should just flip the entire globe. A mirror image. It would put Erelae back on the west coast and only minor tweaks would be needed to the climate.

[rotting bones]

^That's the same as reversing the direction of planetary rotation, except the constellations would still look the same and rise from the same relative direction. This is probably the best idea if the mountain ranges are malleable. Then it won't be too difficult to adjust the topology of the terrain and save the Rau jungle.

PS. No, not a single mirror image. Sorry, I thought you were saying something else.

[zompist]

Brandrinn, are you sure you're not thinking about ice ages? I can see that southern Ereláe might be quite cold during an interglacial, more like Canada. But not being in an ice age, the planet should be warmer and climates overall less extreme.

[zompist]

Silly board was making the topic too wide, so I made the map smaller. The link below goes to the larger image.

[Salmoneus]

I'd like to have a look at the climates, but don't have time now. Maybe give me a week and I'll give my views. (You don't happen to have a Mercator or similar, do you? Those divided maps confuse my hindbrain, even though I know they're actually very simple).

I'd note, though, that you're both making assumptions. Zompist is right that the cold areas can be warmer than on Earth. Zompit is wrong that Almea isn't in an ice age - or at least wrong about the reasoning. "I don't want it to be in an ice age" is fine, but continental position alone isn't enough to determine. After all, if it's further from the sun, or has a slightly thinner atmosphere, or the sun is a bit dimmer, it'll ALL be colder, perhaps enough to mimic an earth 'ice age'. Contrariwise, there have been times in earth's history that looked like ice ages in terms of continent location but that actually were in warm phases.

The lack of obstructions, plus what looks like a larger amount of water, do point to a warmer, wetter world, but that can easily be adjusted (or accentuated).

It should also be noted that the sizes of the atmospheric cells need not be fixed at 30 degrees each. If the world is warmer, equatorial convection is more important and the polar low is less important, so the Hadley (and probably Ferrel) cells will expand, and the polar cell will contract.


Finally, I'd like to encourage people to think in terms of underlying processes, not in terms of Koeppen classifications, which were designed for modern Earth. Different worlds may have climates that don't appear on Earth, or that only appear in very small areas. A good example here is something like the climate of the Azores: similar to the Mediterranean climate, but without the summer drought. In wetter epochs, a lot of the Mediterranean had that climate, and hence very different vegetation from now, but the possibility of that climate is overlooked if you just look at Koeppen maps. [You could also get it, iirc, if the alignment of continents around that latitude is different]
(This laurisilvan climate is usually called 'humid suptropical', but it's very different from, say, the Deep South - it's usually milder in temperature fluctuations, and it has the Mediterranean inverted rainfall pattern, with moist winters and dry-ish summers (and it's drier overall than the Deep South). Hence the vegetation is typically evergreen hardwood, unlike either of the two climates it resembles)

[So Haleza Grise]

Wow, this is big!

Frankly, I'm a little disappointed as it seems that a revision on this scale is going to mean we don't get to see many more grammars in the near future .

[alice]

Finally, I'd like to encourage people to think in terms of underlying processes, not in terms of Koeppen classifications, which were designed for modern Earth.

This is reasonable advice, but the Köppen classifications are still useful to a point - as Zomp says, there's not much point worrying about the difference between Dfa and Dfb, for example. What is important is the yearly variations in temperature and rainfall, and if you have a hot dry summer and a mild wet winter, there's no harm in calling it "Mediterranean" or "Cs[abc]".

Unfortunately, as far as I am aware, it's very hard to quantify this stuff. Until someone comes up with a program which will convert a Map into temperature and rainfall figures, working out your climates will require a lot of educated guesswork and head-scratching - and, no doubt, opportunities for Salmoneus to point out where you've done it wrong, as he helpfully did with my own Map

[zompist]

I'd like to have a look at the climates, but don't have time now. Maybe give me a week and I'll give my views. (You don't happen to have a Mercator or similar, do you? Those divided maps confuse my hindbrain, even though I know they're actually very simple).

Sure. Please do comment when you get a chance



You're right about continental positions not being determinative of ice ages, though for now it's a matter of "other things being equal". Other factors are easily enough tweaked.

It should also be noted that the sizes of the atmospheric cells need not be fixed at 30 degrees each. If the world is warmer, equatorial convection is more important and the polar low is less important, so the Hadley (and probably Ferrel) cells will expand, and the polar cell will contract.

Excellent point, as is the bit about the Azores climate.

[dhok]

If the Rau jungle is desert, but it still has the Rau river, you might be able to go so far as to switch the location of Xengiman. Because, with the Rau river, what you're likely to get is a flood plain not unlike Sumer or Egypt(where agriculture on Earth originated...and Xengiman was the beginning of agriculture in Almea.)...and the Easterners could be placed in the Western Wild. Then again, that means that they'll have contact with Nan very early on. What to do with Xengiman itself I don't know.