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[FearfulJesuit]

As the sort of person who enjoys worldbuilding, I thought I might start this informative post to describe a potential revamp of climate.


Here's the problem with DF climate: it's completely unrealistic. A six-way climate divide based solely on temperature simply isn't realistic.


So here's the climates I think we could include.


Glacier
Precipitation: Very low from the sky, but quite high in real terms because of blowing snow.
Temperature: Freezing all year round.
Found where: Greenland, Antarctica. Likely to form on continents and islands that are at very high latitudes.
Notes: This is actually the only climate that doesn't thaw at all.

Tundra
Precipitation: More than in a glacier or ice cap climate; mostly snow. It may get some rain in summer, but not very much.
Temperature: A tundra climate will thaw for around a month and a half to two months in July and August. Otherwise it will be entirely frozen.
Found where: Northern Siberia, northern Alaska and Canada.

Taiga
Precipitation: Not very much (about 7 inches of rain and 60 of snow per year in Yellowknife), but conifer trees will still grown in abundance because of the low rate of evaporation. They will, however, be rather short.
Temperature: The frost-free growing season is about 100 days; in DF terms a taiga climate will thaw in the summer months and remain frozen about the rest of the year.
Found where: Northern Canada south of the tundra, Alaska, Scandinavia, huge swaths of Siberia.

Oceanic
Precipitation: Varies, but is constant throughout the year. It may range from only about 30 inches (London) to over 150 inches (Ketchikan) a year, but is, again, pretty much evenly dispersed throughout the year.
Temperature: What marks an Oceanic climate, aside from even precipitation, is that the temperature doesn't vary much. The difference between the average summer temperature and average winter temperature in London is only about 25 degrees Fahrenheit, which really isn't all that much. However, the actual average temperature may be colder (Iceland) or warmer (northern Spain) than the average. Oceanic climates vary. Indeed, Ketchikan is so moderated that the lowest temperature ever recorded there is warmer than the lowest temperature ever recorded in Tallahassee. However, the insane amount of rain found in the Alaska Panhandle is because there are mountains nearby.
Found where: Northwest coast of North America, western Europe, New Zealand, the southeast coast of Australia.

Humid Continental
Precipitation: About evenly distributed throughout the year, like in an Oceanic climate, but humid continental climates never get enough rain to count as temperate rainforests.
Temperature: Unlike an Oceanic climate, the temperature here varies, a lot. It is quite cold in winter, when most precipitation falls as snow, and quite hot in summer, when it may routinely reach 90 degrees.
Found where: Northern US, Eastern Europe, northern China, Japan.

Humid Subtropical
Precipitation: Evenly distributed throughout the year (although you may get a bit more in summer than winter). May get enough to count as a rainforest at high altitudes and low latitudes, but this is rare.
Temperature: Mild in winter- it might freeze, but it won't get much colder than that, and will be above freezing much of the time- and very hot and humid in summer.
Found where: Southern US, southern China, southern Brazil, northern Argentina.

Mediterranean
Precipitation: Plentiful, but there's not too much of it, and it mostly falls in winter. Summers are hot and dry.
Temperature: Mild in winter, very hot in summer. This is really just Humid Subtropical without the even precipitation.
Found where: The Mediterranean, California, Perth, Cape Town.

Steppe
Precipitation: There's not a whole lot, but it will be above ten inches. Although there may be a few trees, there won't be very many, they will be scraggly, and they will stand alone.
Temperature: Depends- it may range from much like a Humid Subtropical temperature pattern at low latitudes to one more like a Humid Continental at high ones.
Found where: Central Asia, the Great Plains.

Desert
Precipitation: Very little- less than ten inches a year. There might be grass, but it will mostly be dirt. Vegetation will be rare.
Temperature: It may range from scorching in the summer but warm in the winter to hot all year round (in equatorial rain shadow deserts like coastal Peru) to freezing in winter but scorching in summer (Central Asian deserts) to just plain cold to cool all year.
Found where: Sahara, Southwest US, coastal Peru, Gobi desert.

Monsoon climate
Precipitation: Loads, but mostly in one half of the year. The other half won't get very much at all. If it gets none in the dry season, it will be a savanna climate like that of East Africa.
Temperature: Constantly warm all year, scorching in the dry season.
Found where: India, the Sahel, parts of Brazil.

Tropical Rainforest
Precipitation: Loads, all year round.
Temperature: Constantly in the 80s to 90s or so.
Found where: Amazon, Congo, Indonesia.

Anyways, that's my plan for the climate types that I'd like to see in DF.

[10ebbor10]

I'm pretty sure the dwarf fortress system is a bit more realistic than that. I know it models rainfall and rainshades ( Or I read that somewhere). If it doesn't, it certainly should. It might even, with some work, be capable of simulating complexer weather systems.

I do agree on more biomes though.

[Jeoshua]

There is a concept that exists here which does not truly exist in DF's system:

Oceanic vs Continental climates.

Right now there very little variation between interior and exterior of a continent.  The outlying coastal regions tend to be relatively flat, but this is not always so.  Marshes may change to saltwater if near enough to a low lying water filled basin, but other terrain types do not change.  Temperatures do tend to be more moderate around oceans, but that doesn't actually change the tropical/temperate/arctic designations.

[NW_Kohaku]

Umm... We already have a freak-ton of biomes. 

Check the wiki: http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Biome
There's already nine types of swamp alone. 

We do have rain-shadows, as well, and it even has an option to turn them off.

Biomes are determined by not just temperature, but drainage and rainfall, as well. 

[FearfulJesuit]

Yeah, but biomes are different from climate.

Really, we need to start by actually making planets, not the worlds we have now, with actual geologic histories.

[GreatWyrmGold]

The biggest problem I see (as a know-little as far as climate goes) is that anything modeling a "planetwide" climate needs to account for the fact that the DF world is flat.

[FearfulJesuit]

That will have to change. It'd be easiest to model it as a cylinder, along the lines of an equirectangular projection, for example.

[NW_Kohaku]

Actually, you don't have a planet in DF, you have a "Region".  Even the largest maps have a landmass roughly equivalent with Belgium.  For adventurer mode, you have the option of rolling up a "Human Outsider".  That doesn't mean a space-alien, that means someone who just walks in from a place outside the region. 

Temperature isn't a smooth as it looks, either, because you can up the temperature variables, and have an area with tundra next to a tropical rain forest. 

Toady just uses a set of parameters under normal worldgen conditions that forces one end to have glaciers and another to have tropical regions, but you can just as easily have a wholly cold region.   

[Jeoshua]

Actually, biomes are more specific than climate.  And they more accurately model what one would encounter as far as flora and fauna, which is what they're currently used for, than just "climate".

We already do have a lot of biomes, but we don't have anything which separates oceanic from continental areas, as I noticed above.  So a few more and the biome set could be complete.

We're currently missing overarching categories of:

• Coastal - Near the ocean.  Saltwater marshes would be in this category, but what about oceanic mountains, plains, deserts, hills, and forests?
• Continental - Generally hills, but not always.  These should vary in both flora and fauna, not to mention temperature and rainfall, from more ocean-based biomes
• Shore - Shallow water near the coastlines.  Not currently differentiated.
• Deep Water - Almost never adjacent to land, but a huge sea cliff, giant rift, or an island from volcano poking up might create land next to really deep water.  Here there be dragons.  Real life examples could include Loch Ness and Lake Baykal, or simply the Marianas Trench

[NW_Kohaku]

We already have saltwater swamps and marshes, and they come in temperate and tropical varieties, no less. 

The problem with those marshes is that DF doesn't currently do depths of water less than "river" very well, so they aren't much more than forests with extra murky pools. 

The only issue that has been raised that I'm not sure is already in the game is in how much of an effect oceans have on making climate more mild. 

[Jeoshua]

They have almost no effect, as far as biome is concerned.  Look at the embark map.  Biomes go straight up to the waters' edge without changing course or seeming to be affected by the presence of a large body of water.  And through anecdotal evidence, I've never noticed anything occur in an ocean-side biome any different than an in-land one other than salt water and some marine life.

And yes, we do have Saltwater Marshes, but not all seaside terrain is marshy in real life.

[NW_Kohaku]

And yes, we do have Saltwater Marshes, but not all seaside terrain is marshy in real life.

Nor is it in-game.  Marshes only occur in highest-rainfall, lowest-drainage locations.

And of course there isn't a "beach" biome on the map, it's too small to show on the map.  There are "murky pool" designations you can give for creatures like turtles to be in murky pools, but murky pools don't show up as a map biome. 

[FearfulJesuit]

New idea: define climates in terms of four different variables:
Temperature: glacial, polar, subarctic, temperate, subtropical, tropical.
Temperature Pattern: oceanic, continental.
Precipitation Amount: 80+ inches, 60-80 inches, 40-60 inches, 20-40 inches, 10-20 inches, <10 inches.
Precipitation Distribution: Winter, Summer, Year-Round.

Technically- very technically- this means that you have 216 different climate types to work with. Luckily for us, probably less than half are going to show up in the vanilla raws, because not all these climates actually exist in the real world.

For example, let me create a tag for the city where I live in, that could show up in a raw. Pittsburgh gets a goodly amount of rain- 37 inches- per year, spread fairly evenly throughout it, and is temperate in climate, but it's quite cold in winter and quite hot in summer. So if, in vanilla DF, we accept that Pittsburgh's is the sort of climate that we want to appear, then in the raw file climate.txt, we will put in
[TEMPERATE:CONTINENTAL:20_40:YEAR],
Likewise, if we wanted to put in Ketchikan's climate, it would probably look something like this:
[SUBARCTIC:OCEANIC:80:WINTER]
(I'm just going to say that an oceanic subarctic climate as we've defined it will usually be above freezing, but not by much. Ketchikan will still get summer rain- it'll just get much more winter rain.)
London would look like this:
[TEMPERATE:OCEANIC:20_40:YEAR]
Iquitos, Peru, would look like this:
[TROPICAL:OCEANIC:80:YEAR]
(Really, all tropical climates will be defined as oceanic in the real world, because of their constant temperatures.)
Phoenix, Arizona, would look like this:
[SUBTROPICAL:CONTINENTAL:10:YEAR]
The South Pole:
[GLACIAL:CONTINENTAL:10:YEAR] (although glaciers will get so amazingly little precipitation that [YEAR] is basically meaningless.)
Cambridge Bay, Nunavut:
[POLAR:CONTINENTAL:10:SUMMER]

However, what are we to make of the following tag?
[POLAR:OCEANIC:40_60:YEAR]
That doesn't even really exist in the real world. Tundra climates are always continental, and they always get less than 10 inches of precipitation a year. Therefore, in vanilla DF, climate.txt will not include this tag, because this tag describes a climate that specifically does not exist in the real world.

(Actually, it sort of exists- not with this much precipitation, but some subantarctic islands like Bouvet Island are indeed oceanic polar with year-round precipitation. They're quite rare, though, and I don't think they get this much precipitation.)

Feel free to mod it in; but if you don't like snow, you'd be a fool to build a fort here; it'd get loads of it. If you wished, even, you could redo the climate raws from scratch to create a world that's all temperate rainforests, or none of which is warm enough for trees to grow, or which never dips below freezing, or (shock) all of which is a pretty good climate for doing just about anything. Potentially this could even have an effect on crop growth and civilization growth à la Guns, Germs and Steel. A tundra and glacier world will support only those civs which grow nothing above ground (that's goblins and dwarves). A taiga world would support no elves. It might support a few humans- you can grow, for example, potatoes and carrots and the like in a taiga climate- but they will be geopolitically inconsequential. Could even force some species to be solely hunter-gatherers. Dwarven ingenuity in a world of just desert will allow them to survive and develop civilization on their underground crops, but humans will never develop agriculture- they'll just be hunter-gatherers- and elves will never even evolve. Goblins, which eat raw meat, will be marginal in a desert world, but they'll do perfectly fine in a grassland climate; they'll just probably be nomads. Thinking about it now, that's an interesting possibility. Humans have four lifestyle options: either they can be hunter-gatherers who move around (the Inuit), hunter-gatherers who stay put (the Northwest Coast Indians before whites moved in), people who move around but also raise their own food sources (the Mongols), and people who are agricultural and sedentary (every civilization, ever.) Depending on climate, certain groups would be slated to be this or that. Dwarves will, thanks to the underground, always be agricultural and sedentary, but it's not altogether impossible to imagine that in a rainforest world, elves will never develop agriculture because they'll never have to, despite having settlements- they'll just pick fruit from the abundant trees. Or a world where humans develop agriculture along rivers where there's water for irrigation, but otherwise herd animals around. That'll affect who comes to trade and what they have to trade with you.

[dfTruF]

For more realistic climate mechanisms it would be nice when DF world become spherical as a planet (in the biggest world option), and this should bring every subtlety for this fact:

1. Oceanic and land weather patterns.
2. Global climate changes (natural and triggered by overcrowded, dominant civilization) 
3. Global pollution and desertification.
4. Amount of ice around northern and southern pole.
5. Coastlines and small islands are connected with climate changes.

[irmo]

What would we gain from this, gameplay-wise?