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Does anyone know how I can easily get information on Arthur Strahler's climate classification system? Any links, any thresholds, anything you can tell me at all? The only things I can find are snippets and a climate map through search engines.
It seems he wrote a book called Elements of Physical Geography; maybe it would be in there. But I can't find any papers by him about the subject in Google Scholar.
Strahler is like the Köppen system but geared towards climate genetics. The Af climate for example is subdivided into equatorial climate and those that receive trade winds. The desert climate is subdivided from that which is near the coast. The arid climates are different according to the thermal zone.
It seems he wrote a book called Elements of Physical Geography; maybe it would be in there. But I can't find any papers by him about the subject in Google Scholar.
Yes, I have that book (used in my first geography class in college). I don’t have a working scanner so I can’t produce a digital copy. But the 13 categories (each described separately with graphs for representative stations in each category) are:
Group I Low Latutude Climates
1. Wet equatorial climate
2. Monsoon and trade-wind littoral climate
3. Wet-dry tropical climate.
4. Dry tropical climate.
Thank you! Thank you all. I had a feeling I would like Strahler from his delineation of a "trade-wind" tropics. Before I try to purchase it online, Xeric, can you give any definitions or thresholds for types 1 and 2, and any more detail on the letter subtypes?
That’s a good explanation. Category 2 has a short, relatively dry season of 2 to 3 months. The trade wind variant is not as wet as the monsoon variant. The examples are Belize for the former and Cochin for the latter. The category 3 example is Timbo Guinea - 163 cm (64 inches) annual precipitation, mostly from May through October; under 10 cm in March, April, and May; almost completely dry in Dec., Jan., Feb. So 6 months of the year are very dry and the other 6 months are quite wet.
Thank you! Thank you all. I had a feeling I would like Strahler from his delineation of a "trade-wind" tropics. Before I try to purchase it online, Xeric, can you give any definitions or thresholds for types 1 and 2, and any more detail on the letter subtypes?
There aren’t really numeric thresholds per se. It’s more along the lines of the overall trend of the climate: how long the dry season is, whether there is a pronounced cool or cold season, seasonality of precipitation, etc. The classification is described in a chapter called “The Global Scope of Climate.” Then the following chapter discusses soil-water budgets for each of the categories in the earlier chapter. Examples are given for each climate and a soil-water budget is included for an average year (as a graph). Variables are water need, soil water surplus, precipitation, soil water deficit, water use. The climate classification is based on air masses and frontal zones (outlined in the earlier chapter) but also on these soil-water budgets. For example: a category 1 climate has no soil-water deficit through the year while a category 2 climate has several months of a small soil-water deficit.
This textbook is a treasure trove of information about the global atmospheric circulation, potential vegetation, land forms and soils, and a lot more. Each map extends across 2 pages (and this a large text book), and the cartography is impressive. I highly recommend it - in fact I originally sold it back to the university book store but regretted it later, and was able to find another geography student who wanted to sell his copy.
Last edited by xeric; 07-02-2019 at 01:03 AM..
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