EDOPS Signatures deliver multi-band environmental profiles for any point or area on Earth, drawn from global datasets covering hydrology, climate, terrain, ecoregion, and historical land use. See the page documentation to learn more.
Choose Settlements to look up a place by name or coordinates. Choose Polities to query a historical polity by name and time slice.
A signature is every environmental variable
for this query, grouped by band. A single basin gets one value per variable plus its
global percentile; a set of basins (buffer, ring, polity) gets a distribution instead
-- an area-weighted percentile, a concentrated/spread badge, and a histogram.
Full explanation
This tab compares each variable's local value (this basin alone) against its upstream value (the whole catchment draining into it), and classifies water provenance from the contrast -- endorheic, coastal terminal, exogenous supply, or local-dominant. Values are read directly off the signature, not separately calculated. At L08 most basins' upstream catchments are small enough that local and upstream nearly coincide; the contrast is most informative at L06.
This tab shows the basin's monthly climatology as two diagrams -- Walter-Lieth (precipitation and temperature by month) and Polar (the same curves traced around a year-clock) -- plus scalar indices summarising them: precipitation and temperature concentration, peak months, the phase offset between the two curves, and temperature's seasonal amplitude.
Two places are never simply "similar" -- they may share a precipitation regime and differ in almost everything else. This panel asks the question one variable-group ("lens") at a time -- Precipitation, Temperature, Terrain, or Climate -- rather than collapsing everything into one composite distance.
It's a membership test, not a ranking: a basin
either clears every threshold in the chosen lens or it doesn't, with no partial
credit. The result is the actual set of basins meeting those conditions together --
an empty set is as real an answer as a crowded one, meaning nothing else on Earth
matches this place on these terms.
Full explanation
A worldwide view, independent of any resolved place. Every basin is coloured by a discrete climate class computed from its monthly rainfall and temperature curves.
Run Get signature to see the environmental profile.
Run Get signature to populate analysis.
Click a location and run Get signature to load seasonality.
Click a location and run Get signature to load context.
Click a location and run Get signature to find similar basins.
A global view — no place is queried. Colours are declared climate classes.