World Map WIP in GIMP

[Karro]

I'm not sure if the winds would be reversed in the southern hemisphere. The coriolis force is, but that governs only cyclonic patterns. The planet is still moving beneath the air, so wind should still generally blow from the west, even in the other hemisphere.

I'm no meteorologist, though, or even a hydraulic engineer, so I could be entirely wrong.

Yeah, I couldn't remember for certain, but I seem to think I recall maybe from middle school science classes a map of earthly trade winds that showed them reversed in the southern hemisphere. I could very easily be misremembering that. I will need to look it up, I suppose.

For climate help try The Climate Cookbook. While your at it look over Creating an Earthlike World on the same site. Very informative, fairly simple.

Hint: The equator isn't so hot a place for deserts. Well... it's hot, but not very dry.

Thanks for the links. I'll definitely give them a look. (I've also read a great PDF from a few years back - a freely distributed section of a larger for-sale e-book - about the basics of developing a realistic geography for a fantasy world. Alas, it is one of many things lost when my harddrive crashed a couple years back, and my google-fu is too weak to find it again.)

Though I don't mean to disagree with you too much, a quick study of earth-environments shows that most of the worlds major deserts appear to be near the tropics or the equator (the Sahara, Middle East/Arabian Peninsula, American Southwest). The rest appear to be very far inland away from major water sources or the results of some sort of rainshadow effect. Obviously, of course, I'm not fully versed in climatology and what all influences it, so I'm hoping to learn more.