Trying to make sense of Xadia's climate
I started working on this a while ago but I don't think I ever posted it. I like world building that's guided/enriched by real science so I wanted to see if I could come up with an explanation for why xadia's climate zones are the way they are. I'm going to post my observations here and update as I go.
(note: I'm not a climate expert (although I might pursue an enviro sci degree in the future) I'm just one person with wikipedia. So feel free to correct me if I'm making wrong assumptions, especially if you have a background in climate science or similar!)
Let's start with what we know (or can guess) about Xadia's temperature and precipitation trends!
I'm going do divide the world into three temperature groups (hot, temperate, and cold) and three precipitation/moisture groups (wet, moderate, and dry).
Here's our legend:
And here's our map:
My reasoning for these colors:
Neolandia (Hot Dry): Neolandia is described as a "harsh desert" on the TDP website, so it's defiantly very dry. I'm assuming here that it's hot, too, since the few official images I've been able to find of it seem to most resemble real world hot deserts. However, I can't find any official source stating that it's hot, so it also might be a temperate of cold desert.
Del Bar (Cold Moderate): The TDP website describes Del Bar as a cold, mountainous area. It doesn't say anything about moisture levels, so I assumed moderate. It's important to keep in mind here that the cold temperate here could be due to altitude rather than being part of a wider temperature trend.
Evenere (Temperate Wet): We know that Evenere is a swampland, so it's going to be wet. I do wonder if the reason it's wet is not from rainfall but just because it's at a very low altitude and soaked in ocean water/semi flooded all the time. The website uses the word "dreary" to describe Evenere a lot, which I think of as probably cloudy and maybe on the cold side, but I feel like temperature could go either way so I marked it as temperate here.
Duren (Hot Moderate): We know that Duren is very fertile. I think that the most comparable climate on Earth is the Mediterranean climate of Southern Europe, which is on the warm side with a wet winter and a dry summer. It could also be wetter
Katolis (Temperate Moderate): The website doesn't say a lot about Katolis' climate, but it looks to me like a mixed broadleaf forest that might be found in the eastern US, eastern China, or Central Europe. All of these places are generally temperate with moderate rainfall.
The Frozen Sea, the Shiverglades, and the Black Tundra (Cold Dry): These areas all appear to be polar climates, either ice caps (in the case of the Frozen Sea) or tundras (In the case of the Shiverglades and the Black Tundra). Climates that are this cold tend to also have low precipitation, since cold air can't get very humid.
Lux Aurea, Midnight Desert, and surrounding area (Hot Dry): This was one of the easiest ones. The area around Lux Aurea strongly resembles the Sahara and other hot deserts. The Midnight desert could be cooler in temperature, but I chose to group in with Lux Aurea for now.
Moonshadow Forest (Temperate Moderate): As with Katolis, the Moonshadow Forest looks to me like a temperate forest.
The Storm Spire through the Far Reaches (Temperate Dry): The area surrounding the Storm Spire looks grassy with some lichen. The Far Reaches in the Xadia game looked to me a lot like the semi-arid deserts in the Southwestern USA. I think this whole area is one stretch of semi-arid steppe and plains, probably getting hotter in the south and cooler in the north.
The Uncharted Forest and the Drakewood (Temperate Moderate): This area looks like another temperate forest to me.
Patterns and observations:
Confusingly, the hottest and coldest areas seem to be thrown together in the north with the more temperate areas in the south. I think there must be some magic at play with the temperature contrasts up north (maybe the presence of the Sun Nexus heats the area around Lux Aurea?) but that would still create some pretty weird weather patterns.
I'm not sure what's causing Neolandia to be so arid. It might just be that extreme heat is causing very hight evaporation rates, but I'm not really sure where the heat is coming from either.
I'm interested in the Spinning Sea and how it might affect winds and storms.
It looks like the weather patterns in Xadia and the Human Kingdoms might be opposite? In the Human Kingdom's it's hotter in the north, cooler in the south. In Xadia it's very cold in the north (except for Lux Aurea, which I already suspect is hot because of magic) and warmer in the south. That definitely seems like some magic shenanigans going on!
If you read this far thank you!
I think I'll do winds and pressure next.
