Introduction

Planetary climate is surprisingly complex. The main driver is wind, which forms six bands of convective cells, three above the equator and three below. These cells twist due to the Coriolis force, so that their ground passage is largely west-east. The cells' movements carry water inland. Over time, or especially if the water-laden wind hits mountains, rain falls, resulting in more-fertile land. For a more-detailed explanation, I recommend this great article.

Trying to guess the steady-state dynamics of all this by hand is prone to problems. Hence, I've written this calculator, which will run a (fairly ad-hoc, but roughly validated against Earth's climate) simulation. It should at least produce a result much better than one could practically do by hand.

Simply upload a heightmap, set the water level on the heightmap, and watch it go! You can save the results when a steady state is reached.

Note that the calculator requires WebGL, and I've only been able to test it with a "recent" version (the API is so problematic, I am unsure which one, but it's probably 2).

You can change the simulated resolution by adding the desired resolution at the end of the URL and refreshing (e.g. "climate-sim.php?width=1366&height=683").