Resources for Weather Patterns

I'm working on constructing a planet for my book. The only thing I know for sure is that it's tidal-locked and it has a large river, but I want to play around with other features so I can get the weather right. Does anyone know of any resources or programs that can help me? Anything would be appreciated.

A good starting point is that on a tidally locked planet, the subsolar point is going to be a permanent low pressure zone, and hence the weather there will be that of the Earth's Intertropical Convergence Zone, except all the time and concentrated on a smaller area. Thus, lots of rain and clouds. This could be the source of your river. Beyond that, the other major factor that will shape the planet's climate is the Coriolis (pseudo-)force, the strength of which depends on the duration of a year (which is also a day) on your planet. If sufficient long (several tens of Earth days), the Coriolis force is basically negligible and you get a huge, planet-wide circulation: high altitude warm winds blow towards the dark side, and return as low level, cold wind. With faster rotation (a few Earth days), you get a jet of air circling the planet along its equator (this is called superrotation), warming as it passes over the day side and cooling over the night side. Because this warming and cooling isn't instantaneous, you get regions on the night side that are unfrozen, and regions that are frozen despite being on the day side. Moisture doesn't spread much to the higher latitudes. The thunderstorm patch near the subsolar point also looks like a chevron instead of a roundish blob.

Okay, this should get you going. For more details, read this paper http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.753.9382&rep=rep1&type=pdf You won't understand much of the text unless you have a background in physics, but the figures should help you picture the climate of the planet. Note that they chose two models with rotation periods of 1 Earth day and year, respectively, neither of which is plausible (the actual value would be somewhere in between, and the climate of the planet as well).

edited 16th Jun '18 12:34:44 PM by InigoMontoya