How to Create Your Own Climate Map of Europe
"Climate" describes what the weather will typically be at a given location at a given time of year. The concept of climate is not useful for making specific weather forecasts; it is, however, useful for defining weather norms. Understanding the climate is particularly important in agriculture, architecture, transportation, and civil engineering. To create a climate map of a large area such as Europe, you will have to compile large amounts of weather data from many individual locations. Creating a climate map can be an excellent, albeit time-consuming, science project.
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Instructions
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Purchase a physical (i.e., topographical) map of Europe.
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Divide the continent into distinct geographic areas. Use mountains, hills, and large bodies of water as boundary lines. If you do this well, the climate in a given region will tend to be pretty consistent. Having more regions of smaller size will thereby greatly increase the accuracy of your climate map.
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Identify at least one city or town in each geographic region. If you can, identify several specific locations, preferably spread out from each other. This will increase the accuracy of your climate map, in case one location in a region turns out to be an outlier, or in case a particular region has a mixed climate.
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Decide how precise your data points will be. To build a climate map, you will need weather data that was recorded at the same location at regular intervals over a period of one year. A good middle-of-the-road interval is to record weather data from the 1st and 15th days of each calendar month, which will give you 24 points of data for each location over the course of a year.
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Research weather data over a period of one year for each location. (If weather data is not available for a particular location, find a substitute location in the same region.) You can usually get daily weather records for each location from local municipal or university libraries. Sometimes this data is available online. If not, contact the libraries and ask if copies of the data could be mailed to you; you may have to pay a fee.
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Record the daily high temperature, low temperature, and precipitation amount for all the intervals over a period of one year, for all locations in all geographic regions. You can also record the day's high sustained wind speed and direction, if you want. This is the raw data from which you will make your climate map.
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Graph the data for all intervals in the course of a year at a given location. Each variable---high temperature, low temperature, precipitation, etc.---should get its own graph. This will give you a sense of how the weather changes at a given location over the course of a year. Repeat this step for all other locations.
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Compare the graphs of all the locations in a given geographic region. If they are similar to one another, it is evidence that your geographic region has a consistent climate, which is good. Repeat this step for all other regions.
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Merge the data from all locations in a given geographic region. This will enable you to generate a single set of graphs for each region. From this, you can describe the climate of all of Europe in a given year.
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Collect data from other years, using the same intervals and locations. You can merge data between years at a given location, which will help to cancel out unusual weather events and give you a more accurate overall climate map.
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