How could bird people map the air?
For sentient avians, knowing the location and behavior of currents in the air would be vitally important. Jet streams, thermals, downdrafts, and shear layers would all be important in their daily lives.
I imagine that bird people would want to map these currents. While they might change on a daily basis, common maps of persistent features in a landscape, as well as up-to-date maps of specific features in real time, would be incredibly useful for planning movement and navigation. Merchants and armies, in particular, would be highly reliant on these maps for planning logistics. The difficulty in doing so is that air currents are three-dimensional, and any map of these currents must be capable of informing its user as to the three-dimensional nature of these phenomena.
What would be the best way to create these maps? Obviously, how to display such maps will depend on the technology level of the avians, so for the purpose of this question, how would a race of avians with rennaisance-era technology map the atmosphere?
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/18926. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
1 answer
Maps
I made a partial example map for the birds of a land called Tjerokya. It uses (crude) arrows to show the path of currents traveling across the land and sea. Indicating changes in three dimensions is harder, so I used colors to describe the changes. Redder colors mean rising currents, and bluer colors mean sinking currents (yellow and green are near the middle).
There are two additional features I didn't implement here:
- Wind speed. Longer arrows can be used to indicate faster winds.
- Altitude. Simply use thicker arrows to indicate higher elevations.
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