[WIP] Building a world from tectonics onward

[Tiluchi]

Just jumping in to say that that topography looks amazing! As Charerg said I think it's the first 100% complete planet I've seen done with Wilbur, so for that alone it's very impressive. Not sure to what extent you messed with GPlates, but you can input your finished map into GPlates by linking your continent polygons to the raster file, which might help in confirming that the geology makes sense from a tectonics perspective.

My only *tiny* nitpick is that the coastlines in general look a little more irregular than we generally see on Earth- not sure if that's just an artifact of the Wilbur processing. I always have to look at the coastlines of Africa and Australia to remind myself that very smooth coastlines are actually quite common in many areas!

[MrBragg]

Not sure to what extent you messed with GPlates, but you can input your finished map into GPlates by linking your continent polygons to the raster file, which might help in confirming that the geology makes sense from a tectonics perspective.

Thanks Tiluchi! I used gplates to work things out starting from the previous supercontinent, so features older than that were added via artistic license Even doing that much was a bear, so going back any further gives me terrible flashbacks to agonizing over plate interactions.

My only *tiny* nitpick is that the coastlines in general look a little more irregular than we generally see on Earth- not sure if that's just an artifact of the Wilbur processing. I always have to look at the coastlines of Africa and Australia to remind myself that very smooth coastlines are actually quite common in many areas!

Appreciate your feedback here. You know, I actually went back and smoothed some areas during my pass on topography, though now that I look at things again I think you might be right... Something for the to-do list, I suppose.


In any case, I've kept playing around with ExoPlaSim a bit and managed to get a T85 model with completed topography and more reasonable temperatures to complete. Since that worked, I've been trying to work on how to import the EPS outputs into the Azelor et al tutorial here so that I can correct some of the systematic errors from EPS. By 1) manually adjusting the temperature to "undo" EPS's low resolution elevation cooling and then readjusting using a high resolution heightmap and Azelor's guide and 2) a little hand-waving on the precipitation maps, I managed to convert the EPS Jan / July temperature and precipitation maps into the right color format for the tutorial; other than still being a bit warm and perhaps a bit too wet, IMO they look reasonable:

Jan / July Temperatures


Jan / July Precipitation


From there, I can run AzureWings script to generate a Koppen map which matches up quite well with the raw and interpolated / altitude corrected results from Nikolai's script. The agreement isn't perfect, but it's certainly good enough IMO to indicate that this process captures the main features. Interestingly, the AzureWings result doesn't have the same extensive regions of mid-latitude Med climates and (too) high latitude hot deserts as the results reading directly from the EPS data; not entirely sure how the Pasta scripts use the EPS data but it's interesting to see that not reproduced here.

AzureWings


Raw EPS


Interpolated / Altitude Corrected EPS (only a single year as the script doesn't like my averaged nc files)


Now that I've gotten this working, I should be able to manually alter the EPS temp / precip outputs to correct some of the systematic errors and get to a reasonable compromise climate map. Overall, not too painful, either


P.S. I haven't forgotten about doing your T85 earth calculations, worldbuildingpasta. This last T85 for me took a bit longer than I'd planned as I needed to reduce the timestep to 15 minutes to prevent crashes, so I'm just a bit behind. Yours is next on my queue though, so hopefully not too much longer!