Advanced weather: Difference between revisions

* terrain exposure to sun: Again, for thermal convection, a frequent problem involving lots of trigonometry would be - given a coordinate, find a 100 m x 100 m square area around that point. Find the orientation of that area in space (i.e. compute its normal). Given the time and date as input, compute the position of the sun, and based on surface normal and sun angle, compute the amount of thermal energy flux through the surface compared to the maximal one (i.e. when the sun is directly overhead flat terrain, surface normal || sun angle). So, a function f(coordinates, time, date) which returns a number between 0 (no sun exposure, e.g. during night) and 1 (maximal sun exposure). Computing this in Nasal a few 1000 times might be unreasonably expensive...