Hello Guild,
Due to immense struggles in taming the ExoPlaSim program, I've accomplished relatively little since my previous post. Despite about 30 hours of tinkering with the program, I couldn't properly simulate the temperature data for my world's topography, although the default Earth map ran nicely using my world's parameters. Thus, all I had to do was extrapolate the temperatures and then the climate.
I owe a great deal of credit to Nikolai's (worldbuilding pasta) helpful and prompt technical advice for ExoPlaSim, without which I couldn't have accomplished this level of detail. As Frodo--my world--is strikingly dissimilar from the Earth, I don't think that Azelor's climate tutorial would have accurately produced the temperature and climate data.
If you're interested, Frodo has a 5 hour day, a 785 earth-day year, a larger diameter and mass, over 2 times greater atmospheric pressure, a negligible obliquity, but a considerable eccentricity.
Here's a temperature map for Frodo, shortly after perihelion, when temperatures have attained a maximum. Notice that the land is hotter than the oceans at about 30 degrees, but then colder poleward.
Then shortly after aphelion, Frodo looks like this. Notice how the land is everywhere colder than the ocean.
And then here is a crude Koppen map:
As you can see, Frodo consists of primarily desert terrain and no tropical rainforests due to very minimal precipitation, in turn due to a higher atmospheric pressure and a lower level of average insolation. (Water evaporates less readily in dense air). Notice how rapidly the climate transitions from temperate oceanic (Cfb) to tundra climate (ET). Worldbuilding pasta mentioned this phenomenon in his blog, which was a huge source of inspiration for me.
Does anyone know why my parameters work beautifully on Earth topography, but start giving me very cold climates once I've dialed Frodo's topography into ExoPlaSim? I initially thought that maybe the CO2 was condensing at the poles due to the unusually low temperatures (-95 C), until I got rid of mountains and terrain in general past 60 degrees north and south.
Incidentally, I've discovered that Frodo would not have cyclones below a threshold of about 2.1 atmospheres; hence my reasoning for ramping up the pressure. The results of this situation, a "desert world with cyclones," will form a beautiful backdrop for the plot I have in mind.
Next I'll be working on precipitation. I hope to have figured out ExoPlaSim by then!
Cheers,
Peter
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