Very interesting indeedOriginally Posted by Pixie
Very interesting indeed
One thing that I think you have to do before fleshing out climate is to work out your rough topography first. Basically, you need to figure out how high those various mountain ranges are. In particular, the mountain ranges in Mistaya and the southeastern coast of Arenda look like they have the potential to be huge, being as they are the products of the vigorous collision of plates that are each moving toward one another. So you're going to have the same problem that I do- how to deal with Himalayas that sit smack on the equator...
For another instance, on the Earth's Koppen map all that the Appalachians accomplish is to draw some relatively mild northern climates a bit further south. At higher latitudes, in Siberia the Urals and other ranges clearly cause strips of colder climates along them, not unlike the Appalachians.
But the Himalayas are so high that they have tundra over most of them, crate a massive cold-desert rainshadow, stop the massive Sahara/Middle-east desert from progressing eastwards, and clearly drive high-elevation temperate climates west/east/south of them.
The Andes are tall but very thin, rising with a great relief almost from sea level, so they act like an impenetrable wall blocking west-coast climates from extending from more than a strip on the west coast of South America.
Finally, some isolated high-elevation zones do weird things- like Kilimanjaro and Mt. Kenya in Africa which seem to create mediterranean or temperate climates in the middle of otherwise tropical climates.
I also think that you can give your world a bit more character by adding in some random lower mountain ranges like the Appalachians and the Urals. These aren't readily explained by the plate tectonics as you show on the first page of this thread, because they are older remnants of historical processes that aren't vey active any more. The Appalachians are remnants of plate collisions during the formation of Pangaea about half a billion years ago, in the Ordovician! Jawed fish hadn't even appeared yet! Technically the Appalachians extend into Europe and even North Africa (as the Lesser Atlas Range), for that matter- look at your Panaea map on the first page and you'll see how that can be. Or google the International Appalachian Trail, or the Wikipedia Page about it. This intercontinental meta-Appalachian range is supposedly the remnants of the Central Pangaean Mountains.
A fun intellectual exercise might be to fit your modern continents into a pseudo-Pangaea and see where the remnants of similar ancient mountains might be...
Last edited by acrosome; 05-09-2014 at 11:40 AM.
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