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Q&A

Weather and climate of Massive Grass Plains?

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In my world I want a massive region (7 million mi²) to be as flat as the Great Plains. There are no trees or hills; basically it's just a grass sea.

I am trying to figure out what kind of weather patterns would develop; such as wind speed, rainfall, and climate. I also would like to know, in a region that large, how hostile to life would it be?

The region is bordered by the ocean to the east and mountains to the west/northwest. If my world had an equator¹, it would probably be just a little above it. I don't believe there will be any bodies of water in the region, except some streams maybe.

¹to answer some questions the world TECHNICALLY has no equator because it is more cylindrical (unless I have no idea what equator means-- which is likely). However as it is a fantasy setting with magic I have more or less hand waved the fact that given the normal laws of physics it would crush it self into a ball.

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This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/175869. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

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Unless trees don't exist, this is dodgy. Even in the actual Great Plains, there are trees, especially around bodies of water. (This includes streams and ponds; you don't need something like the Great Lakes.)

Assuming your world isn't entirely crazy¹, you can probably get fairly substantial grasslands which, as you go further north, turn into taiga (e.g. Canada and Siberia). Rainfall will likely be modest except near the coast.

I would recommend mocking this up in Azgaar's FMG which provides some automatic climate tools. Here's what I came up with after a few minutes fiddling:

Heightmap Biome map

The light green drab is grassland, the dark fern green is taiga. Note that you will naturally get forests (bright green) closer to the equator and around rivers which turn into temperate rainforest near the coast.

Note also that the scale of this map is 0° - 60° and it still only has about half of what you want (and that's counting the taiga). I think you will need a landmass about three times the size of North America to get what you want. If you want warm grassland, i.e. not taiga, you're going to have to either go much bigger or else somehow give your planet much less temperature variation by latitude.

I won't comment on how likely this geology is or isn't.

(¹ As PipperChip noted, what's this "no equator" business? Is this a ringworld or other such artificial construct?)

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