Elevation, Weather Charts for Entire Fictional Planet

[Podcreature]

So I’m making a map of Pern, as from the novel series “The Dragonriders of Pern” by the late Anne McCaffrey. *Hat-tip to the first woman to receive the Hugo and Nebula awards for her science fiction.*

Okay, so I’m a big fan and I’m not a map-maker, but I need a map to suit my purposes. We'll just see how it turns out in the end! I’ll share what I come up with as I go, and list some of my main goals, and proposed methods for how I might do things. Whatever anyone wants to throw out there, advice or criticism, is more than welcome. If there’s a better way to do something, I’m likely to be ignorant of it, lol.

Realistic stuff:
Firstly, my goals and needs are to create a detailed height map and also weather charts for an entire planet.
That being said, if anyone knows of some good climate maps, or guides, I'm new and need to learn as much as I can...
Canonical references for the map I'm making can be found here: The Pern Museum/Maps and Charts/Maps from the Books and this section has some exciting maps from the book "The Atlas of Pern" which I think many cartographers would have fun using as reference to make an updated versinon. http://www.agriphoto.nl/pma/Maps%20a...ern/index.html I know I'll be needing these.
I plan to use Wilbur. I want the mountains to appear to be the realistic scale, not stylized and over-sized. I'm new to this software, and I don't really know what to expect. (Wilbur does work fine with windows 7??)

Style stuff:
I want to create a more simple map for demographics, roads, labels etc. Marrying the realistic terrains I plan to generate with a stylized map will be tricky for me, as I want the theme to be unified and cohesive, but when it comes to presentation and styles, I don’t know much. So suggestions for fonts, effects, presentation will be super helpful as I make updates.

Tools: Photoshop CS6, Wilbur, and later, possibly other freeware as I learn about them.
Right now the map project is 23760 x 11880 pixels. I need to learn more about file size... whether this is right for a detailed map of a whole world, I don't know. I definitely want lines and texts to show up crisp and clear even when scaled out. Still newish to Photoshop so here's hoping I make the best use of it!
Well that’s enough for now, feel free to take a look at the base map I’ve created from the canon ones in the books using the same longitude and Latitude lines.

Update 9/29/13: Better template image for building my heightmap:


This is the old map I made, using Gimp only:



Thanks for reading.