Anyone have any guides/tools for determining realistic climate foe geography?

[Marscaleb]

This is something I think about when designing a world map. The geography drastically impacts climate; adding a mounting range in one spot can turn an area into a desert, adding some lakes that are big enough will create cold fronts in certain regions.
I have some idea of some of these effects, but I would like to know more. I'm curious if there are any tools or at least comprehensive guides to how the geography is going to effect weather and climate. I would love to have a program where I could paint some land and mountains and have it calculate for me what kind of weather I would have. Where would my deserts be? Where would my forests be?

Anyone know where I could find such a tool, or find a detailed guide?

 

[pmmg]

That would be tricky. Heck its tricky on our own world. We have the great conveyer belt in the ocean which contributes a lot. If another world is different it might not even have this.

Typicllay. Rivers go from mountains and to oceans. And land is usually arid on one side of a mountain and green on the other. And lakes are just where ever the ground was lowest or made by something.

I would think important would be jet streams and ocean conveyers. But i doubt any reader will go that deep into a story.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

I never found one particular source but dug up information from all over the place to make the world mostly "plausible." But I also have layers of magical interference involved. For instance, plate tectonics is accompanied by planular tectonics. My major ocean currents follow the basic rules as do the trade winds and jet streams. The Inter Tropical Convergent Zone, or ITCZ, is useful to learn in order to understand how and why it moves north and south around the world. Honestly, it's been so long since I plotted out my world that many of the websites I used are probably gone, heh heh.

 

[BearBear]

Unless you're designing a whole world, use local affects and presume they're similar to your region of choice.

For example, look at the united states, we have all that. If your area is on the lee side of a mountain range, expect desert. If that's at a high elevation, expect high desert like the Gobi. If it's on the wet side, then expect a lot of green and rain. Also presume a prevailing wind, a jet stream and it's fairly predictable by simply looking at those early jet stream maps and geography on google Earth, you can easily look up weather patterns, historical averages, extremes, etc. When warm air wafts up to meet cold air then you get big storms. Tornadoes require flat land, hurricanes require warm water coastline, snow requires higher lattitude so you'll have longer summer days and shorter nights in summer, the reverse in winter.

I got away with not worrying about this because I chose Earth in a different timeline and age, and in any reasonable timeline weather is likely similar. Pursuming I stay in the holocene era, I'm safe-ish. Fast forward 10,000 years and all bets are off.

 

[CupofJoe]

I use Wikipedia as a starting point. If I want a place to have the weather feel of [for example] a high dry desert, I look up the climate of a town in a high dry desert. Then I riff from there. As for the larger area effects, I also tend to start with real-world examples. If you look long enough you can find almost anything you want. For one, I love that there are a few rivers that actually run through mountain ranges, and there are other rivers that just end in a desert...

 

[Finchbearer]

I’ve been working on a map for my world too, and I’ve based it on a real world landscape and climate - looking at Google maps is helpful, where I want to have vast wetlands, I’ve looked at Norfolk, England for example. Where I want to have an estuary in a coastal city running from a range of mountains I’ve looked at the real world places where this occurs. That’s the northern hemisphere too, so not really any deserts but plenty of mountain ranges, and vast forests. Basically I’d say real world examples are your best friend. You can reasonably adapt your map and model it on real climates and topography.

 

[pmmg]

Secretly, most of the woodland settings in my story are based on a park near my house .