The surface temperature changes rapidly over land masses to day-side values of about 290 K and to night-side values of about 240 K. The ocean surface temperature changes more slowly; the night-side ocean remains near the freezing point for the length of the simulation.

Precipitation patterns change rapidly (within a few months) from the zonally-elongated intertropical convergence zone that is typical of Earth today to a configuration in which there is substantial precipitation near the subsolar point and little precipitation on the night-side of the planet. The regions of large precipitation are determined by the atmospheric circulation: the near-surface atmospheric flow converges near the subsolar point, leading to strong ascending motion and condensation (see Merlis and Schneider (2010) for a detailed discussion). The topography (e.g., the Andes) modulates the precipitation patterns so that they are less concentric about the subsolar point than in the aquaplanet simulations in Merlis and Schneider (2010).

The net evaporation field (evaporation minus precipitation) shows that atmospheric water vapor is transported from the night side to the day side. Regions on the day side of the planet away from the subsolar point, such as Canada, experience net drying. They become relatively warm because of the loss of evaporation as a cooling mechanism for the surface. Sufficiently far from the subsolar point, there is net evaporation, which eventually would lead to the formation of deserts and complicating habitability of those regions.