My last post on this blog [LINK] about my intuitions for climates was over 1 year ago, in 2024. Since then, I have continued to read more about climates of the world. Later in 2024, I was particularly more careful to look at maps of mean surface-level wind velocities. This led me to start to carefully catalog the climates of the world and attempt to explain them based on mean surface-level pressures & wind velocities along with qualitative ideas about the differences between air masses at different temperatures & humidity levels. I felt satisfied doing so for Oceania as well as for Africa in the southern hemisphere. I did so for South America at the middle latitudes (which is entirely within the southern hemisphere) too, and I thought of continuing through tropical latitudes in South America, near-equatorial latitudes in Africa, and thereafter all tropical, subtropical, middle, and subpolar latitudes in the northern hemisphere. However, as I looked more carefully at these maps and compared them to actual climate data from various locations, I started to think that my understanding of these climactic processes is too limited, especially by my focus on qualitative understanding of surface-level phenomena, to be able to come up with accurate explanations. (Even looking back at the post linked at the beginning of this paragraph and even older posts linked within that post, I can see how many things I have said in those posts that I know now to be inaccurate.) Because of that, I shelved the idea of continuing with these detailed explanations until much more recently, when I started looking more carefully at maps of sea/ocean surface temperatures and at calculations of air density at various pressure levels, humidity levels, and temperatures. This made it possible for me to reinforce my intuitions about temperatures & precipitation distributions at various locations in the aspects in which they were correct and fix them in the aspects in which they were wrong. Thus, this blog post is meant to be that originally-intended compendium of explanations for climates in various parts of each comment in tropical, subtropical, middle, and subpolar latitudes (excluding Antarctica).
The sources that I used were many relevant pages from Wikipedia, the Columbia University interactive maps of mean monthly wind velocities [LINK] & mean monthly sea/ocean surface temperatures [LINK], the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecast static global maps of mean surface-level air pressures in different astronomical seasons [LINK] (though this website has very recently started displaying a warning that the maps are now out of date), and the OmniCalc air density calculator [LINK]. Again, I am not a trained climatologist or meteorologist; I can't guarantee that this information is accurate, and I can only say that my intuitions seem through my limited understanding to align with superficial aspects of more detailed explanations. Follow the jump to see these explanations.
