Flora & Fauna: Micro-climates versus Magic

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In book four, there's a tale of some deadly magic that permanently effects a community with perpetual winter. Realistically, this is something that doesn't happen in a temperate zone. Micro-climates are a thing. There can be two places that are geographically close to each other with drastically different weather on a given day. A great example is the town that is about halfway to the city from here is weird when it comes to weather. When the entire region is getting hammered with precipitation, the skies are clear there. When the rest of us have relatively clear skies, they are getting deluged like it's nobody's business.

This is fairly normal with micro-climates, as odd as it sounds. Differences in the lay of the land and how the weather moves through due to it can create pockets where the temperatures are different from other parts of the region and things like rainfall happens at different rates. Generally, valleys tend to be more sheltered from the harsh weather in winter and a bit cooler in the summer. (This is part of the reason why the Finger lakes region here in western NY has so many wineries. The micro-climate is just about perfect for growing grapes. There's a winery just down the road from us that is always doing brisk business and they're slowly acquiring more property to expand and such.)

Mountains tend to be more exposed to heavy weather and cool all season the higher you go. The windward side of the mountain is going to have harsher weather conditions than the leeward side. The same is true for hills, though to a lesser extent. Plains are just difficult places. The wind just whips right along and there is no natural shelter or windbreaks to lessen the extent of what the hard weather does. Summer time, you have no relief from the heat and winter time, you have no places where you can escape the full brunt of the storms that come. And the storms generally tend to be bigger and meaner because they've got more room to build up. There's a reason why tornado alley is mostly across the plains states of the US.

Magic in my books can alter the micro-climate. This can have devastating effects on the region where it happens. Given time, the prolonged effects of a magical change to a micro-climate can alter the weather patterns around that area and cause a cascade of harmful effects to the region. Magic can be used to put a temperate place into perpetual winter (arctic conditions) and this will gradually cause the area around it to become part of that place's state because there is no fluctuation or regulation of the perpetual winter of that location. Fortunately, magic can be used to reverse the effects. The problem is, the more entrenched the harmful magic is and the larger the range of its effect, the more difficult it is to reverse the consequences. In some regions, the effect is functionally permanent because there has not been a magic user with sufficient ability to mitigate the harmful changes present for a very long time.