What you will learn in World Climate and Climate Classification

1. 1. How long is climate

   Ninety-one years of real daily temperature at Fairbanks, and one question: how long do you have to average before the answer stops depending on when you looked? Choose the window yourself before the convention is shown.

2. 2. Six dials

   Latitude, altitude, distance from the sea, ocean currents, prevailing winds and relief, as six dials on a synthetic planet built from the real one's zonal means. Build a Mediterranean climate, a monsoon and a cold desert — and find a climate that two very different settings both produce.

3. 3. Reading a climograph

   Twenty real stations on the 1991–2020 normal, named only by number. Read the bars and the line, decide the hemisphere and the climate group, then see whose climate it was.

4. 4. Köppen's logic

   Five letters are the answers to a short list of questions, and every threshold sits on a vegetation boundary. Run stations down the tree, push their numbers across a line, and find out why the driest place on Earth is not a Köppen desert.

5. 5. The world map

   Every land point of a 5° grid classified on the globe, against the best map latitude alone could draw. Trace each place the stripes get wrong to one of the six controls, then drag Greenland to the equator and watch a map projection lie about its size.

6. 6. Climate that varies without changing

   El Niño, La Niña and the neutral state, each the average of the real winters that fell in it: the warm pool moves, the rain follows it, and rainfall half a world away answers. Then the line the next module depends on — variability around a mean against the mean itself moving.