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So this is a two part post, hopefully someone out there with Knowledge: Meterology can help me a bit with one or both! :)
Firstly, I am trying to determine what the weather patterns are for Brevoy, Varnhold and the Stolen Lands. In other words, what are the normal flows of warm and cold air coming from and going to, where are storms likely to form, etc. If anyone knows of any canon info on this or has meteorological knowledge and has mapped these for themselves, help would be greatly appreciated.
Secondly, I would appreciate either some correction or fine tuning of the weather patterns I invented and have been using. I have cold air coming down from the Lake of Mists and Veils, in a steep south easterly direction, then sweeping east over the southern Icerime, Restov, and Dunsward. Then I have warm air coming up from the direction of the River Kingdoms, going further north than normal due to the Hooktongue.
These flows cause lake effect type snow up north quite bit, bring a fair number of storms to southern Brevoy and Stolen Lands, and quite a bit of regular precipitation. This also causes an occasional big storm to swing down into my players' kingdom.
Is this weather pattern making any sense based on "real world" meterology or am I completely living in a fantasy world? :)
How are other GMs handling weather? It is sort of important to get this at least sort of right, since I have an A-R druid, and environmental engineer, and an archaeologist in my group. I already got the third degree about the directions all the rivers flow, etc etc. and I am looking to avoid that when they get around to analyzing the weather.
Physics of Golarion doesn't necessarily follow the rules of our world, because magic is a legitimate answer. Why does that river flow backwards? A crazy water elemental did something a long time ago.
To my knowledge no one has ever written up rules that determine specific weather patterns for regions of the world, and I doubt anyone will because to most of us that level of minutiae is unimportant.
If you want something, make a table with varying percentages for what the weather will be that day. Obviously rain, snow, etc should all have different % for the time of year and geography. But don't go deeper than that, it's madness.
I think your basic ideas about wind patterns and such seem reasonable.
I created an Excel workbook that will generate a year's worth of random weather when I was starting Kingmaker. I posted it to the boards so anyone can use it.
You can adjust the parameters to your heart's content; I used historic weather data from Warsaw, Poland as the basis for my version of the Stolen Lands.
I would suggest running the sheet once, then copying the data out of the calendar sheet and pasting the values only into another sheet - the sheet tends to run all the random generation whenever you open it. It can be locked, but I still found it would bypass that on a regular basis.
Let me know if you have any questions about the sheet, and I'll do what I can to help troubleshoot.
Late to the party I know, but my 2 coppers anyway.
First: Your weather patterns seem ok to me, they at least should pass most sniff tests if nothing else. Anything odd can be explained with "I'm sorry, I didn't realize Golarion was Earth." Or in other words, who's to say that weather on a planet filled with magic and demons and dragons and rifts, etc. behaves the same way as Earth?
More to the point though, in looking at the map of Golarion in the Inner Sea Guide, Brevoy is very far north, as in, the top of the map. I think somebody had once said that Magnimar is supposed to roughly approximate Seattle. If that's the case, then Brevoy is North of that and might more or less correlate to Central Canada (North-South wise). Regardless, its definitely cold throughout much of the year in Brevoy (something I think GMs should be quick to point out prior to character gen, then have fun with when the players don't take any precautions for rough weather in a wilderness. I know I have one player who has never bought a tent until he was "burned" for not having one. He tried to say "Well, I just assumed I would have one by now." But I digress.
Back to the OP, the flow indicated does seem to more or less jive with North American weather patterns (based on just a very casual observers recollection of weather reports on the evening news, etc.).