Precipitation & Pressure Redo - Worldbuilder’s Log 32

[@WolfWalrus]

I treat Artifexian videos like Wikipedia articles. Edgar is great at doing original research but one of his key strengths is finding other experts and enthusiasts -- either by reaching out to them directly, or having them contact him -- and collating their knowledge into a digestible form with impeccibly thorough footnotes.

[@gentleshark972]

3 points I´d like to bring up: 1. Wet and super wet are of course interesting but by doing so you´re combining deserts, grasslands and savana in one mix. Which really misses out on important distinction berween them. I´d personally reccomend also adding arid regions with scarce precipitation (seasonal and medditerabean regions have seasons of being considered weg or very wet, wheras savannas and grasslands never get enough rain to be considered wet, but still enough to be not be dead). 2. A big factor most people are forgetting is evaporation by biomes, some 40% of precipitation in our world is provided by evaporation (if I remember correctly) with certain biomes such as the tropical rainforests sometimes recycling 80% of their water. As an example, the sahel is likely fed by rain mostly provided through evaporation. Even spawning hypotheses that a reclamation of Sudanese wetlanfs for more productive means would cause the sahel to experience more droughts and central asia to receive more water due to more runoff reaching egypt instead of evaporating in Sudan. This could make water go further inland, neccesary at making the wirld less desert-y like you noticed yourself. 3. Colder air contains less water, this is off course why mountains force precipitation, but this is also why arctic regions are cold deserts or tundra around the world. Wet areas close to the ice caps wouldn´t be as wet. This is one of the reasons why tundra are so dry.

[@zfloyd1627]

Artifexian can take care of number 2 once the biomes are done.

[@Things_Are_SUS]

I would also add to be careful about the max 2000 km rule (4:55). The Atlantic ocean provides even western Europe (over 2500 km away) with rains. (Obviously, much smaller, and there is a significant decline beyond 1500 km away, which happens to be the border of the oceanic and continental climate ). Studies presenting the change in summer rainfall, when the Atlantic is warmer, show that terrains up to Moscow are greatly influenced. One of the reasons is that on higher latitudes rainfalls aren't as large as around the equator, and winds don't dry out as fast. Maybe another layer for "very dry" would be better for deserts.

[@ajdogz5088]

Something useful would be a rainzone that separates normal rainfall from completely dry. I believe MJW does that Edit: Something to add, vast amounts of rainforests and other vegetation that goes through water quickly can create potential sources of rain thanks to all the water being re-released by plants. I'm not sure if it would go as far as creating a difference on the rain map, but it's something interesting.

[@gentleshark972]

It is really impactfull, some 40% of the worlds precipitation is water provided by evaporation. Dense biomes, the principal being forests, cause a lot of evaporation, reducing local runoff and pumping water further downwind.z The tropical rainforests even form a sort of aerial water basin, recycling 80% of its own water in some regions. The Sahel on the other hand as an incredibly long strip of land is arid but not a desert. This because its fed by water from east-africa with one of its principal sources being the marshes in Sudan.

[@ajdogz5088]

​@gentleshark972 just didn't want to risk spreading misinformation about how big its impact was, so i left it in the air. But thanks!

[@gentleshark972]

@@ajdogz5088 oh yeah you´re 100% correct in doing so. Its just one of the few things I so know a little bit about.

[@addisonmartin3200]

Evaporation from trees is partly why the Amazon extends as far as it does. A lot of that rainforest essentially waters itself, from what I understand.

[@madelinejameswrites]

😂 I actually tried out the front system in my latest personal worldbuilding project when you shared it because I was like oooh that looks new and way more straightforward

[@worldbuildingpasta4242]

You know, the curious thing is the first version of my guide had low-pressure systems and a more complex system with I think like 5 levels of precipitation. The trouble was that the first few times I saw other people try to follow it the results varied considerably and deserts tended to end up in very odd places. I ended up rehauling that section to trim down a lot of the details and switch from gradients which people seemed to have trouble working with to more stark contrasts: rather than several gradations of pressure, there would be just subtropical highs and fronts, with fronts doubling as an indicator of precipitation; rather than 5 levels of wetness, there was wet and dry, with very wet as a bit of a kludge to cover tropical climates. The idea was to forget trying to recreate a whole picture of the climate and just zero in on the key points necessary to get the minimum information required for Koppen zones, without having to deal with all the little ambiguities of real climate. Ironically enough I've been kinda coming back to the outlook lately that you can't avoid the ambiguities and it's probably better to accept that you need to just spend some time looking at real climate patterns so that you can go through this process with a more intuitive sense of how the outcome should look and adjust along the way. But I've also decided I'd go mad if I kept trying to do over that one tutorial a dozen times.

[@idle_speculation]

Maybe just very wet/wet/moderate would work? It’s just one more zone and it better represents that most regions get at least some rain.

[@worldbuildingpasta4242]

@@idle_speculation The overall idea here is that the current version of the worldbuildingpasta guide is narrowly focused on the goal of producing reasonable climate zones, and while that involves going through winds and precipitation, it's not necessarily designed to be a fully accurate representation of them--so adding an extra precipitation zone that doesn't actually help distinguish zones any further would be beside the point. Trying to accurately represent precipitation would, if anything, actually make it harder to work out zones, because you start having to worry about things like precipitation/evaporation ratios and the differences in scale. Within the Koppen system, the aridity threshold can vary between basically nothing at the poles to over 50 mm/month average of precipitation in tropical climates with strongly seasonal rain, but is more typically something like 10-30 mm/month in the temperate regions, with the steppe/desert transition always at half that, and the minimum rainforest threshold is at a minimum of 60 mm/month, but rainforests can easily get up to averages of over 500 mm/month. So I just don't see there being a good way to build a single system that's simultaneously accurate to the actual ranges of rainfall up to hundreds of mm/month, precise enough to pick out the gradations of ~5 mm/month necessary to pick out cold deserts, and reasonably intuitive and easy to draw out.

[@gregwochlik9233]

Its too late for my world... I am at the "add roads and highways" stage. I used your much simplified method of having straight winds, and setting up the climate zones. This particular world does have a "contraversial quirk"...

[@daniel_rossy_explica]

I'm still stuck in the tectonic history stage.

[@jasonlewis4438]

​@@daniel_rossy_explicaI'm still making freaking oceanic crust

[@AaronGeo]

Episode 69420: Climates

[@hydrashade1851]

episode 99999999999: bacteria land films

[@AaronGeo]

​@@hydrashade1851 Episode 10¹⁰⁰ (googol) First lifeforms on land

[@dayalasingh5853]

I mean seriously though I do think it'll be in the next 6 episodes or so. If next is temperature I'm not sure what more can fit

[@kulichkun8709]

​@@dayalasingh5853 I think these are some topics that are worth an episode: -Temperature (+temperature follow up :) ) -Last glacial maximum -Rivers and lakes -Climate / biomes -Ores, minerals, coal, oil and gas -spec evolution (like Biblaridion, maybe simplified) - worth a cycle of episodes Next culture, countries, etc...

[@dayalasingh5853]

@@kulichkun8709 I think we'll get conlangs before countries but I guess that's under culture. I wonder if we'll get conreligioning, it's not everyone's cup of tea but I personally love it

[@ambo1245]

I love waterboarding :D

[@acushekpl6370]

real :DDD

[@BanditCat003]

One thing to consider is that it is a super earth, so applying earth metrics is wrong because winds would be stronger due to more gravity, higher density, and greater coriolis effect. So scaling a planet up shouldn't dry it out too much because the winds should be able to carry water further inward than on a smaller planet

[@golwenlothlindel]

Hmmm... so here's the thing: planets with a greater radius than earth are not necessarily significantly more massive. Continent size depends on the planet's radius, coriolis effect strength is dependent on the planet's mass (because that plays into how fast the planet spins). A planet with a radius one tenth larger than Earth's could have continents 20% larger than Earth's, but assuming the same chemical composition as Earth would probably not be significantly more massive. Keep in mind too, that these maps are very large scale. For this stage, the difference between 20,000km and 25,000km is not significant enough to worry about. I could see increasing the precipitation limit by 500km for every .1 increase in planetary radius to reflect the slightly higher mass and stronger coriolis effect: so a planet with 1.9 earth radii would have a 24,000km limit. Meaning at this stage of the process you should still use the 20,000km number. Later on, the extra 4,000km will become more relevant: but at that stage you will also be adding details like bays, river deltas, barrier islands, glaciers and volcanoes. All of these things, as well as others, have an effect on precipitation. Especially if you want to build concultures you need to be careful not to box yourself in with overly precise numbers during these early worldbuilding stages, so you can create more compelling histories. That's why Edgar is working on such a massive scale here.

[@Grathew]

If you want to add rain to the world without adjusting the oceans, add great lakes. If 200km is enough to spread some rain around a few giant inland lakes could help hydrate the interiors of the continents.

[@davilimalol4612]

I think that's really tough with the topography already done, especially when great lakes don't exist in our world outside the glacial zones or rift valleys, and even our Great lakes (US, Africa and the Baikal) barely qualify for the 100-200 kilometers metric.

[@lordbird4165]

Every time a new video comes out I get so happy :) this is such a good series!

[@GeheimesT]

5:12 If I watched correctly one side of that inland sea will be dry and one will be wet, but that changes with the seasons. I could imagine that creatures that live there have to constantly migrate back and forth (at least those that are not adapted to the dry season). Since the organisms that live furthest to the right would have to go a lot further, perhaps some species would evolve to be more likely to swim through the sea as the seasons change. This would allow them to land in the most desirable zones much earlier than those who would first have to walk around the water on the left. Over millions of years, creatures living in the water evolve to feed themselves from the migrations that occur twice a year, so that perhaps an evolutionary arms race arises in which the organisms constantly become larger or more social in order to survive. But that is an idea for the future and depends on how much you want to flesh out your project, when you begin with the spec evo.

[@nolynste1926]

It could just be similar to monsoon climates here on earth, as that's just climates where changing winds mean it is sometimes wet and sometimes dry

[@ldelgg]

Weird.... KZbin unsubscribed me from you and did not recommend this video to me... I was really waiting for this video, now know how i didn't stumble upon it.

[@BlackEyedGhost0]

I imagine you could mitigate the problem of large dry planets by supplementing it with a thicker atmosphere, meaning stronger weather patterns. The lower elevation mountains on larger planets might also reduce the rain shadow effect, but I'm not certain.

[@idle_speculation]

I personally think WBP’s dry/wet/very wet distinction is overly simplistic, since most regions get at least some rain. Madeline James Writes’s tutorial has more of a gradient that I feel might be better for the purposes of climate.

[@eravas411]

always a good day when artifexian uploads!! dude seriously, you inspired me (a few years ago) to actually start my own worldbuilding project, plate tectonics and planetary sizea and star masses and all and going from there and i’m having a blast so thank you for that!

[@GrayderFox]

Same, honestly. :D

[@hetzer3316]

Artifexian has gifted us again!

[@bobburke7839]

Would atmospheric pressure have an effect on how far inland moisture could travel? For example, If you have a really thick atmosphere, could that allow precipitation to extend further into a continent's interior

[@Zack-fu4lo]

I love your videos. Your demonstrations just make things easier to watch compared to other videos

[@williamturner6478]

Something I'd be interested in learning more about is the difference between climate zones and biomes. A lot of sources will talk about Köppen climates, but give biomes and ecosystems as examples (i.e. the D group are "taiga like Siberia", or how Cs climates are "Mediterranean, so lots of open woodland and good plants to domesticate"). There's not a lot about why you get specific communities of plants and animals in certain climates, and when I plan biomes for an alien biosphere, rather than just reskin biomes on earth, it would be really cool to understand what adaptations are necessary/possible for a climate and build my own biomes unique to the biosphere.

[@idle_speculation]

Köppen climates are really heavily based on temperature, precipitation, and seasonality, and we already have a lot of that in Artifexia. Plus, Worldbuilding Pasta’s original guide offers concrete definitions along with the common biomes of the zones, so we’re probably eating well on that front.

[@ijahnnakehlam5919]

Madeline James Writes has a video talking about biomes I believe. It's the same person Artifexian mentioned on this video

[@Jpteryx]

Tundra: it's too cold in winter for anything that sits aboveground and can't heat itself: trees for instance. Organisms that survive through the winter must either create their own heat or hide underground. Taiga: low temperature means low evaporation, so forests are possible despite the dryness. However, the weak summer and cold winter means that organisms have to conserve their energy carefully. Continental: hot summer creates a great growing season, but then energy conservation is needed in winter. This is why many trees lose their leaves and many animals hibernate. Mediterranean: kind of like continental in reverse, with a cool growing season in winter and a hot dry season. Trees might be able or unable to grow depending on the specific amount of moisture in an area. Plants often cope by drying out in summer, which is what makes them good crops because they naturally store well. I think that's all the more-mysterious climates, let me know if you have questions about other ones.

[@idle_speculation]

Wladimir Koppen was a botanist, so a lot of the zones ARE defined to some degree by the biomes within them. The temperature cutoff for D climate zones is about where coniferous forests start growing, and the A zones are defined by the growing range of the coconut palm.

[@Hwelhos]

Happy new year everyone, its good to see everyone here

[@metagames.errata7777]

Starting my day off right! ... tomorrow. Good night Edgar!

[@jadetheartist873]

This is a considerable improvement here. Also, I have a question, according to Ross, where do the high pressure systems go?

[@madelinejameswrites]

So excited!!!

[@Ratchet4647]

Always a pleasure when you upload Edgar! Happy New Year!

[@heathercampbell6059]

I am a little curious as to why there are so few large lakes on your large world. I mean, we have of course the mediterranean see, but then we start getting the Black sea in the Caspian sea and the Red Sea and the Great Lakes and that's just off the top of my head. I know that the Great Lakes were made because of glacial pressure and movements thousands of years ago, among other thing I'm sure, buthat doesn't seem to be happening a lot here. I guess I would just expect more Very large lakes and/or seas In temperate regions a little bit closer to the ice Where you'd get a lot of the ice wearing away at the ground. Also, looking at the northern regions, especially towards the North Pole, and especially in America, it's very much broken up into tons of little islands. Even getting North of Russia you start getting that a lot. Is that something that will be taken into account? Is there a method for it?

[@GeheimesT]

The Caspian and Red Sea were created thanks to Africa drifting towards Europe, but apart from the western continent we don't have two landmasses drifting into each other. Perhaps the eastern one will form another lake as the long island to its side expands further. Unfortunately, nothing can be said yet about lakes caused by melted glaciers (I think), as their spread has not yet been calculated and whether they were ever particularly pronounced.

[@dayalasingh5853]

I really do love this series.

[@BYROXI5000]

Happy new year ! 😊

[@ajgibson1307]

Happy new year too

[@ATOM-vv3xu]

Finally! I waited the last week

[@Foll-uh7oo]

jeah, i also used a mix of madlaine, worldbuildingpasta, and your videos xD well my reason, was actually, that i had understanding problems of the explantions. because english isnt my mothertounge. its good enough to speak, but when it comes to spezific explanations with terms like "oceanic" etc. and there is no proper translation terms for those words in my language or rather other spezific language etc.( i used machine translation. to check if i could get something from the context out of it.) xD it gets kinda weird but with a mix out of all three it worked+ the freedom of interpretation xD. how big is your world in relation to earth? iam sure you said it somewhere but i missed it. also since iam not really looking into g-plates videos because i had already my landmasses how i wanted them to be. also thx for your videos they are a big help xD

[@theorixlux]

I'm curious: which language is your mother tongue? And this is a common problem for all languages: technical terms quickly lose their meaning after translation. I'm lucky, I only translate English papers to french; a lot of the technical terms are nearly identical. It usually boils down to context, which can be hard even for native English native speakers to understand without a doctorates 🙃. I would say you could skim through some scientific papers/articles/textbooks on geology that are published in your native language. Whenever you recognize a world building concept in your literature, you can "translate" it with the associated word in your literature. I think his world has 30% the radius of earth. This was episode 5, before he booted up gplates. I would recommend looking at the gplates tho; 25% of the video is a boring tutorial, but the other 75% has some interesting ideas and he backs it up !

[@Foll-uh7oo]

@@theorixlux its german. yeah i actually also relooked the terms in texts on my language to some level. I've learned a lot still xD when i see this video, i think there can be mistakes everywhere. i still think i made the best out of what i could get. also i did watch some gplates vids, mostly skimming through the tutorial, and stopped by what he explained. it was interesting,yes. It is also more like a time thing, those videos are long and i want to finish my world at some point. so watching hours doing nothing on my projekt. rewatching parts i try to retranslate to, for better understanding, takes more of my free time than working on my actual world. its not that iam not willing to spend that time, to some level. but landmasses a already set etc. i want to make it to the point were i can finish my climate zones. so while the topic of landmasses building land and the function behind it, is interesting. iam already past that point xD + in detail there are so many variables, you have to make a point sometimes. and since iam not using gplates, yeah. even for weather those guides are more on the generel side. but still pretty detailed. xD (for the most part iam worried about how i set my high pressure low pressure zones on land depending on seasons, thats what worries me the most, cause it can change everything xD) please overlook my grammar mistakes. iam more used to speaking than writing. xD

[@23AlexandreJ]

Hey Edgar! How are you? So, I'm building a world with 4x Earth's atmospheric density. Am I correct to assume that its atmosphere can carry 4x more water and thus, precipitation gets 4x farther inland?

[@gregwochlik9233]

From my pilot studies (around 2007-2009, status: abandoned), I would say yes. RH (Relative humidity) is the "saturateion level of air". 100% RH = fog / mist. As for the linear scaling of the distance, I don't know about that. I would guess that the moisture would come out of the air in a kind of a "exponential decay" function: A lot at the beginning and little at the end.

[@1954_Gojira]

Im still stuck on and struggling with the "how to make microcontinents" video meanwhile this man is reinventing rain on a god danm planetary scale 😂 keep going man, this is awesome

[@doorhanger9317]

One question for larger planets: could a taller atmosphere move water further?

[@miki537]

I waited so hard for this :D

[@Cavusel]

You r best, keep going!

[@notHere132]

I would really like to write a computer program to automate this. How would you go about doing it?

[@Jpteryx]

Programs like these tend to be super in-depth and difficult to use for non-experts, for example Exoplasim.

[@1354-w3d]

keep it up

[@iivin4233]

Would bigger worlds not also gather more gases with their greater gravity? Perhaps they started out as greater clouds of gases and other things. Either way, wouldn't that give larger worlds more fluids? Not to mention the difference pressure makes in forming liquids. I suppose a larger would could also be drier as you said because the gas there would be spread across a greater volume. Regardless, we've found a few so called super earths. Scientists think some of the ones they have found are water worlds.

[@travisguzman5603]

I have a question: Would you need to do this for every couple million years to simulate SpecEvo?

[@daniel_rossy_explica]

Doing ocean current alone for every million years (GPlates' framerate) for a 1000 My old planet would be a pain, but I think it is worth it.

[@GeheimesT]

Depends on how much you want to flesh it out. If you want every little detail then yes, if you want to tackle it more roughly then no

[@travisguzman5603]

​@@GeheimesTwhat do you think should be the minimum time frame for that sort of stuff? 10M years, 50M years, 100M years?

[@GeheimesT]

@@travisguzman5603 Would lean towards a hundred. But at the minimum I would rather look at whether continental drift, for example, Changes significantly or opens or closes a sea strait so that the currents change significantly. For example, the separation of South America from Antarctica ensured that Antarctica was completely surrounded by a cold current, so that the continent cooled and the first ice caps formed. Or the merger of North and South America ensured that the Gulf Stream is directed to Europe, without which there would probably be more glaciers here. But well, it actually depends on how you want to design your SpecEvo Project. If the focus is more on the present, and you only need the past in the sense of roughly guessing which clades rule today and on which Landmass the life, you don't need the currents in the past. Projects like Alien Biosphere or Serina, which take place over a longer period of time, don't have any currents at all and still work. So I would say do what suits you best. Oh and sorry für the Long answer.

[@tinfoilhomer909]

I'm colourblind and I don't understand your precipitation maps at all. the red looks like land, the cyan looks like ocean AND rain, the dark blue looks like heavy rain I guess. Can you make the oceans a bit duller when displaying rain maps?

[@Artifexian]

I'm really sorry about this. I always proof my maps for protanopia and deuteranopia type colour blindness and these precipitation maps seemed fine to me. That said, I'll endeavour to do better in the future.

[@HarryNumbers]

when tornadoes?

[@ajdogz5088]

It'll likely be after he does climate zones, though he might do stuff like rivers before he does a weather events video

[@XVYQ_EY]

I miss WRLST and Oa language development. Why do I even still sub you? Will they come back or should I unsub?

[@Ratchet4647]

WLRST was just a showcase of fan's work that I believe was collected on the Artifexxian Subreddit, so if you miss that, you can head there to see if fans are still posting them there, at least until Artifexxian does another one, if ever, as he is currently working on this new project. If you're looking forward to more conlang content, it will take a bit for him to complete climate mapping, maybe glacial history, some spec Evo, before he gets to worldbuilding Artifexxia's sentient species, and do culture building and conlanging. Until then, there are also other youtubers that do linguistics and conlang stuff, like NativLang, Biblaridion, Conlang Critic, David Peterson, and many others that don't come to mind. Now, the question of why you're subscribed to certain KZbinrs is something you alone can answer.

[@XVYQ_EY]

@@Ratchet4647 Today I learned that it was reddit submition series and that he has his own subreddit. And the reason to sub certain ytber is'f coursely to watch videos that interest you. And maybe you're right. I'll wait. Maybe something new will appear on his channel, like spec-evo...

[@Liethen]

"Babe wake up Bibl........oh, right, I'm single......" (dies inside from forever alone.)

[@Laria-68]

Hollo

[@ayoubelazzouzi5600]

Make a video about the interesting grammar of arabic