In Egypt, as also in Mesopotamia (modern southern Iraq), the man-made thing for irrigation started very early on, so telling what's truly "natural" is no longer really possible. You get a similar effect in the deserts near both places modernly where there's been a rare, heavy rainfall recently; there's a sudden explosion of greenery and flowers in a concentrated area where the rain happened, and the immediate vicinity of the run-off, surrounded by the usual "barren" waste. It lasts for at most a few weeks, and then it all dies-off, and vanishes.

I think "chook" originated with some dialects of English. "Chuck" is a term of endearment still used in parts of northern England, for instance, which derives from the same source, as a variant on "chick" as an abbreviation for "chicken", or from "chick" as being a young chicken. Online sources seem to cover only the modern Australian option as in-use still, however.

And here was me thinking "duck down" was an urgent warning...

Well, technically, it was a Scot, James Watt, who advocated a standardised international decimal system of scientific measurements in 1783, and what we now recognise as the whole series of SI units, sometimes colloquially referred to as the "metric system", was the product of a great many people in various parts of the world over many years from the 18th to 20th centuries, with numerous variant definitions even for the metre during that time. What's now considered that metric system, the formal international adoption of the SI units in fact, didn't happen until 1960, and that Système International continues to evolve.

Sadly, there isn't a suitable metric definition for such pedantry though ??

So, here are my submissions for this 500th map and anniversary contest, The Summer Palace of the Winter Queen. For the contest, these should be considered as a single entry, incidentally; I'm not trying to "stuff the ballot box" with a multiple series of maps here ?!

There's a WIP thread elsewhere on the Forum which gives more details on this set, and the construction process in places, and if all goes to plan, I should be adding higher-res versions of all twelve maps to the Gallery once I've finished this post here. Never done that before, however, so we shall see!

As there is an additional pair of detailing note files to accompany these maps for their final Atlas versions, as well as the usual Atlas submission notes to provide for Remy, I'll send the full set of FCWs, PDF and text files to @Monsen as a separate private e-mail. The FCW files are though included below, following the rules of this contest.

Note that Palaces 5, 6 & 7 come in two versions, the vanilla B&W ones and those with a blue screen superimposed.

Whew!?

Sorry Quenten, I'm not sure there's enough information here to make detailed real-world comparisons with to suggest possible sea currents and prevailing winds.

The fairly narrow global belts of desert right across both northern and southern hemispheres suggests there's something odd happening generally, given the vast expanse of oceans here, which in many places are a lot deeper over vaster areas than Earth's (scarcely any part of Earth's oceans are deeper than 8,000 metres, for instance). That should suggest there'd be plenty of water available for rainfall everywhere, especially on any near-coastal areas where the prevailing winds are onshore. If the planet rotates in the same direction as Earth, that should imply west-facing coasts would be more likely to see higher rainfall tallies, but it looks as if it's more the east-facing ones that are somewhat favoured by this (albeit dependent on the prevailing winds, however).

Aside from the rotation issue, it might be useful to add some latitude lines, such as for whatever latitudes the tropics are at, the equator and polar circles, for example, and also some indication as to what parameters were used to generate the climate regimes (albeit with the latter, you could probably work out for yourself what the more likely prevailing winds at least might be).