Nikolai Lofving Hersfeldt

Public Climate Data Explorations: Habitable Mars

Another tilted Earth climate map

Remember that xkcd what if way back with Earth rotated 90 degrees? https://what-if.xkcd.com/10/ Well I gave it a go in exoplasim, and the results aren't a bad match overall, though I haven't compared the prevailing winds yet and this may be a good opportunity to try out the storm climatology module a bit.

In oth...

Symmetric Earth with 90 Obliquity and 0.3 eccentricity

Balanced at -5 C again. I checked the output files and a traversable gap in the ice belt does indeed open up in the Atlantic for a couple months around the equinox following periapsis.

Koppen climate previews

A couple of higher-resolution climate runs I did to get input data for that ice sheet model and final erosion runs; first is an "ice age" climate with 25 degrees tilt and about 12 C average temp, second is a "modern" climate with 28 degrees tilt and 18 C average temp. Neither were run totally to balance--I'll do a proper final run when this whole procedure is done--but they'll do for input data...

Symmetric Earth with 90 obliquity and 0.1 eccentricity

Finally. My experiment with trying to get it to automatically find the warmest stable ice belt climate never really worked, so I ultimately just had it balance at -5 C, which seems to be close to that point anyway (this isn't the only thing I've been doing this whole time, I've also been doing some runs of Teacup Ae again to get climate inputs to that ice sheet model).

Public Climate Data Explorations: Future Supercontinents

This'll be the first of a few posts I'll be doing looking at climate models that have already been run for published research and have enough public data available to work out climate zone maps.

Part IVc update

Mostly this one was just tidying up some of the organization, but there's some new stuff in there from recent research and I've made a sort of seperate math section as is sorta my standard for these updates.

Hurried Thoughts: Multiple-Moon Tides

Something I hear people worry about a lot so I figured it was worth actually doing some of the math

Teacup Ae Terrain Preview

Bit of a preview of the terrain work I've been doing. This is still wip; each continent has been run at 3 km/pixel resolution for 400,000 years in gospl with uniform precipitation and no uplift. I ran them in individual hammer projections as per my tutorial, but stitched them together here. I haven't touched the seafloor much, you can see the seams between the continent sections if you look clo...

Earth with 0 obliquity and 4-hour days

Thought I'd run this quickly between a couple other models just as a fun aside; it was not quick. Exoplasim really doesn't like running with such fast rotation. Even this result isn't fully to balance, but it's about 60 years in so it's probably not far off.

Anyway, I was just curious how steep of a temperature gradient I could get by combining these factors, and as it turns out...steep....

Hurried Thoughts: You're Wrong About Tidal-Locking

Put this together most just so that whenever someone repeats the whole "tidal-locked planets will be sunbaked wastelands" myth I'd have a concise rebuttal to link back to. Might not have much new for you guys, though I also tried to address some recent related myths at the end.

Earth with mirrored topo, 45 tilt, and 0.5 eccentricity

Earth with mirrored topo, 45 tilt, and 0.3 eccentricity

Almost looks like a mix of high-tilt-type climate in the north and low-tilt-type climate in the south.

Also by the way, added a bit of an update to my wilbur erosion script with extras that I never quite got working right but might be interesting for others to mess around with 2024-02-07 10:34:29 +0000 UTC View Post

Earth with mirrored topo, 45 tilt, and 0.1 eccentricity

Earth with mirrored topo, 23.5 tilt, and 0.5 eccentricity

Spent an embarassing amount of time trying to figure out why this was crashing just to realize I'd forgot to set the "Keplerian=True" parameter

Hurried Thoughts: You Can't Feed a Society with Mushrooms

This is just a bit of a pet peeve of mine, but I tried to make it a bit interesting.

Metal Resources Preview

So I tend to jump around a lot between working on different future posts (and updates to past posts, I still want to do a few of those); it's a good way to keep up a decent pace of work without getting burned out on any one subject, and also helps give me a better sense of what topics I should be introducing in what order to prepare for later posts. As it happens, I got pretty sucked into readi...

Earth with mirrored topo, 23.5 tilt, and 0.3 eccentricity

Honestly wasn't expecting the contrast to be so stark

Earth with mirrored topography, 23.5 degree tilt, and 0.1 eccentricity

This one came through fairly quick. I checked the data and I did indeed set periapsis to coincide with northern summer solstice, overall causing stronger seasons in the north and weaker in the south, which is already fairly obvious in the prevalance of different climate types here.

Earth with mirrored hemispheres

So I decided to put aside my somewhat troublesome runs with varying stars or insolation for the moment and instead do some runs with both obliquity and eccentricity. Trouble is, this might have different effects on each hemisphere--enhancing summer and winter in one and damping them in the other--and that might be hard to pick out on the regular earth map where the hemispheres have quite differ...

Climate Explorations: Eccentricity

Actually had this all ready to go up yesterday and just forgot, and didn't want to wait another week. Given my post frequency I dunno why I really bother with the Tuesdays things anyway.

Climate Mini-Exploration: Shifted Poles

Earth orbiting a K8 star

Now we're seeing a real difference; years here are about 72 days long so there's just not much time for summer.

Attempts to model Earth in orbit of a M5 star have so far been a bit crashy, but might just be a simple scripting error somewhere, I've put up a couple other things in the queue to run until I get around to looking at it.

Earth orbitting a K2-type star

First of the next series of models I'm running after eccentricity, placing earth in orbit of other stars. The general approach here is working out appropriate parameters for a typical main sequence star of a certain effective temperature, setting a year length and solar flux appropriate for a roughly Earth-analagous position in that star's habitable zone (4% of the distance from the inner conse...

Membership testing thing

Patreon's made some changes to how their membership and tiers work and I'm not entirely sure how that's applied to existing members. So I've set the membership threshold at $1 USD a month and I've just put up a climate preview post that should be visible only to paid members; could people just check and let me know if that's working properly and if they need to change anything if they're alread...

Earth with different poles

A couple maps done on commission with the position of Earth's poles just shifted around, with the client expressing an interest in little mini-exploration post being done on the blog as well that I'll put together fairly soon.

Also, I've about given up on getting the model with Earth at 0.7 eccentricity to run for more than a few years without crashing, so I'll start working on a longer ...

Earth at 0.6 eccentricity

Starting to get a bit crashy so we'll see how far I can push it

Hurried Thoughts: Phanerozoic Climate Maps

If you've been a patron here a bit you may have already seen these, but I put together a short post on some paleoclimate data I came across and interpreted into climate maps, with a quick tour of the highlights.

exoplasim updates

So recently I went digging around in the exoplasim code and put together a pull request to add some extra behavior for synchronous planets; you can find that here https://github.com/alphaparrot/ExoPlaSim/pull/5 but it's built against 3.3.0, which I've had a bit of trouble getting working myself; so if you wa...

Earth at 0.5 eccentricity (and zero obliquity)

Sunlight is now reduced to 92% of Earth's if you're wondering