Not just maps: how school atlases shape understanding of climate

School atlases remain important educational tools, but their climate parts may strongly influence whether students understand climate as a static spatial pattern or as a dynamic system affected by variability, change, and risk. This issue is particularly relevant because climate knowledge increasingly requires more than knowledge of temperature, precipitation, and climate zones. The aim of this study is to compare how climate is presented in selected school atlases from different countries and to assess their cartographic, climatological, and didactic potential. The study addresses three research questions: which climate topics and cartographic methods are used, how strongly atlases reproduce a traditional static concept of climate versus recent topics such as climate change and hazards, and what types of atlas-based climate representation can be identified. The research is based on a comparative content analysis of 13 school atlases published between 1996 and 2026. Single- and double-page climate spreads were examined using a binary content matrix that recorded the presence of 39 topics grouped into ten thematic groups. Cartographic methods were also classified, and the atlases were typified according to thematic breadth, multimodality, and inclusion of environmental issues. The results show that traditional climatological content dominates: temperature, precipitation, pressure fields, atmospheric circulation, ocean currents, climate classifications, and climadiagrams are the most frequent topics. Coloured layers, line symbols, isolines, and area symbols are the prevailing methods. Only two atlases explicitly include climate change, emissions, hazards, or environmental impacts. The study proposes a four-part typology of climate representation in school atlases and contributes a transparent framework for evaluating atlas content, supporting future atlas design and geography education.