A question on realism

[moutarde]

I'm also no expert on rain shadows, but I live in British Columbia, and a lot of the highways here go through valleys with a river at the bottom and mountains to either side, and they generally have plenty of trees in them. Except for the southern interior, which is nearly a desert, and doesn't have much in the way of trees, period.

[NeonKnight]

I'm also no expert on rain shadows, but I live in British Columbia, and a lot of the highways here go through valleys with a river at the bottom and mountains to either side, and they generally have plenty of trees in them. Except for the southern interior, which is nearly a desert, and doesn't have much in the way of trees, period.

A fellow British Columbia/Vancouver guy, eh?

When Looking at BC/Washington/Oregon for rainshadow effects one must be careful not to look at the coastal mountains & valleys and apply that to a fantasy world, but rather to look to the Rocky Mountains and the terrain that lies beyound, namely Alberta, Montana, Wyoming, Utah etc to truly see a rain shadow effect.

As the moisture heavy air is blown in off the ocean onto land, it is forced upwards by mountain where is cools and as a result holds less water. So, the BC/Washington/Oregon coast is wet because the moist air almost immediately hits mountain and is forced upwards to discard their water vapor (It's why North Vancouver has way more rain than Richmond/Surrey), but the air retains a lot of moinsture, as it heads inland (In BC at Least) it crosses over the Interior Plateau, a relatively flat region sandwiched between the Coastal Mountains and the Rockies (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interior_Plateau) This region has a lower rainfall because the air is heated here from the land and thus able to hold more water content as so, will not shed what it already possesses as it heads east to the Rockies. Once it hits the Rockies, a much higher mountain chain than the coast, it dumps a lot of it's moisture before in finally flows down the eastern slopes of the rockies into Montana/Alberta etc., where the North American Rain Shadow Begins.