Atmospheric Simulator
The Story
This project started when I first tried my hand at making some Java code for manipulating a hexagonal map. I was going to try out some stuff for a turn-based strategy game (I'm a big Civilization fan!). It didn't take many hours to get the hex map, and it needed some reasonable content.So I created a generator for generating a surface with real continents.
And then a model for the rainfall and water flow.
And then a model for the temperatures and the seasonal variation.
And then the ocean currents.
And then the vegetation types.
At that time I was running at the edge of how much it was reasonable for me to study climatology and meteorology and that kind of stuff. My plan was not to become a meteorologist. I think that with some further development this could be made an interesting learning environment for high school geography classes. I was considering using this program somehow for my master's thesis, investigating data visualization and mental models or something. However, I became involved in another topic for my master's thesis, so I dropped this project.
Features
- Hexagonal map with configurable size and horizontal wrapping.
- Generator with configurable parameters for roughness of surface, land/sea ratio and amount of rainfall.
- Model that takes into account:
- Height
- Water on surface
- Below-surface water reservoir
- Flow of water across land
- Water vapor in air
- Water vapor transfer across adjacent cells
- Temperature
- Effect of height on temperature
- Effect of temperature on air's capacity to absorb water
- Transfer of heat by ocean currents
- (Attempt at modeling air pressure, but that part always sucked...)
- Self-made algorithm for placing the ocean currents on the map. It's not a trivial problem to fit those rings to the randomly generated ocean shapes. The ring shape is not necessary for realism, but without a definite shape, placing just some currents somewhere in the oceans becomes even more of an ill-defined problem.
- A logic to determine vegetation type based on yearly temperature and rainfall distributions. I actually bought a high school geography book to read up on this stuff (I wasn't much interested in the stuff when I actually was at high school...).
- UI to inspect the distributions graphically.
- UI both in Finnish and in English, switchable on the fly.
See a slideshow of screenshots.
If you're interested in trying out the program or developing it further, please contact me!