WIP (sort of tutorial to be) : Climates, applying Geoff's Cookbook at detail (some)

[ltan]

vorrophaiah: I took a trip into the Internet Archives and dug up this link: 19th of June, 2013

If no one else does it, I will work on converting it to PDF if that is wanted.


Edit: DONE!

The formatting was coded nicely so all I had to do was save in PDF...

[Azélor]

I think I should add my own contribution here : http://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/1395/147
There are some topics that we haven't really covered yet: Jet stream, El Niño, deep ocean circulation, fantasy climates ?

Maybe I should make my own thread ?

[su_liam]

Thank you, Itan! I've been looking around for that site. In desperation, I finally got permission from Geoff Eddy to post the worldbuilding and climate cookbook pages in my blog's goodies. The formatting was a little funky, but at least I could refer to the information and charts.

The Wayback Machine allowed me to pull up his other, mostly more linguistically-oriented stuff like the sound change applier which I hadn't kept on my hard drive. I am now slurping it up.
Did I remember to thank you

[Azélor]

Pixie, we're going (or just me) to make an automated process, possibly with photoshop actions. I don't know much about it yet but it can record all the step as I do them. So we can create an automated technique without having to code endless lines of gibberish. One thing I need to figure out is what exact actions should be done. It's mostly selecting layers, add/intersecting/exclude them with other layers and ''painting'' the results on a final or temporary layer.

I already have the workflow for the section on temperatures but now I'm at the part with the rainfall. As I already mentioned, figuring out what places are supposed to be dry require the combination of temperatures and precipitations.


There is 3 important steps to do:

1- find the temperature zones: Ice, tundra. A, B (hot or cold), C (Ca,Cb, Cc optional), D (Da, Db, Dc, Dd optional), so far, it's the easiest part because it's the least subjective
2- find the pluviometric regimes: winter dry, summer dry, or else it's always wet (f). That part is more complicated. I decided to change the regime coverage based on the fact that winter dry climate have very dry winters, much drir than summer are in summer dry climates. And winter dry usually have very wet summers. But all this suppose that the starting rainfall categories make sense.
3- find the humidity level, between humid, semi-arid and arid.

This is actually the most complicated part, because there are a lot of possibilities. I did try to estimate what areas should be dry based on the temperature and precipitation but I'm not sure it's good.

We can ignore the ice and tundra here, they are black.
Ignore the 2 colours of blue, they are both for the A. But light blue is Da
From the 25 possibilities, 13 from the top left are always wet and can be cleared. Or more specifically, they can be selected and put in a separate layer.
We see that, the hottest climate is in the top left of every section. it's the square that is the most likely to be dry with the same precipitation as the other colder climates. As precipitation get lower, all the section gradually becomes more arid until it's almost all desert except for the coldest areas.

Process example: select a humidity layer (humid), select a pluviometric regime (w), select a temperature zone (Ca)
the intersection of the 3 meta layers should give us the Cwa climate.


Here the image I'm using as a guide. Does it make sense?

[groovey]

Hi again Guild! Azelor, if you managed to automate the process of figuring out climate you would have to be made the King of this place. I hope you do manage. I could be a tester once you have it, since mine is still pending an updated climate map and I've just recently started to mess up with my project again.

So best wishes for your work.

[vorropohaiah]

i cant really understand the image, though i think the possibility of a PS action tantalizing, though i cant really see how you could apply something like this to an action. Looking forward to seeing more about this (id love to set it out on my own world too)

[Alphast]

That's some serious background work...

[Azélor]

I can confirm that it's possible to automate some parts of the process with actions, most notably the selecting and comparison of temperature and precipitation layers (step 7). It could be possible to automate the other steps but with photoshop it's very hard.

I'm also planning to make my own tutorial but it's generally an improvement of Pixie's tutorial. I added more clarifications to avoid mistakes or randomness and added some clearer parameters set be recreating the climates of Earth.

The method will have more temperature categories but they are mostly for the extremes, it doesn't make it more complicated.

[MrSquiffy]

Hi there. Apologies for necro'ing a two-year-old thread, but I've been following this guide quite rigorously in making my own world, and I've got a few questions about the temperature mapping, as it's causing me some degree of confusion. Any help or clarity on the situation would be greatly appreciated.

1. With the humidity layer, the guide states to shift the temperatures towards 'hot' 'warm' or 'mild', and to ignore areas already in those zones. How are you able to get to 'warm' following this system, if it's between hot and mild, and you're not to alter temperatures in either? Is it a case where a large-enough contiguous area of high humidity can shift small areas of hot or mild into warm?

1.5. If that is indeed the case, would hot and mild skew towards warm, or hot and warm skewing towards mild (like maritime influence?). Following that, if large masses do push the temperature, does that mean that there can be some shifting in the areas of those temperatures, even if the guide says not to touch them?

2. In my world, there happens to be a thin band of high humidity in an otherwise-'very cold' area. Following the rules, would this create an area of mild immediately surrounded by very cold, or would there be a transitional layer of cold to act as a buffer between the two values?

Any help is greatly appreciated

[Pixie]

Hi there.

Nice to see people following my long abandoned ideas ... Did you notice that at the time of this thread Azelor actually grabbed the line and took it a further step forward (much further!).

As to your questions: the answer is pretty simple.
High humidity air is harder to take to extreme temperature. That's because water evaporation/condensation involves huge amounts of heat exchanged with the atmosphere, and also because humid air has a higher heat capacity than dry air. Meaning that the same amount of energy will take the temperature to a higher point in dry conditions, and that water vapour condensating in colder conditions will keep local air from dipping swiftly into a cold state.

This is the long explanation, now to your questions:
1 - humidity doesn't always take to Warm - it just takes areas out of the extremes of the range. So, no, by that reasoning, a large hot area with high humidity will still be hot.
1 (2nd part) - the two factors are done separately, apply one, then apply the other one, it may just happen that you skew the very hot/ hot boundary in one direction, then you skew it back to its original place.

2 - very cold steps up to cold, and where it was cold before, steps up to mild (...if I remember correctly) - where does Warm come from? Always have the intermediate levels. Take care not to change one level into another level you haven't adjusted before, or you will end up doubling what should be a one-step change.

Hope it helps.
I'm glad you're using this guide. Why not starting your own W.I.P. (work in progress) thread in this forum and share what you have? And also, what I would recommend nowadays is to use my guide, then use Azelor's, independently, and then use the two as a guide for your own take on your planet (kind of take an average between them).