I'm working on graphics for a 4D planet, it's seasons and climate and so forth. To gain confidence I'm doing it correctly it is being done first in 3D, as I know what the answers should be.
The basic idea is to draw a sphere, showing the climate at each point. The usual way to show time is through animation, but here is a different way. On 3D Earth every point with the same latitude has the same climate as every other, so that would be rather redundant. So I thought, why not in the graphic use longitude for time instead? That is, circling around the Earth longitudinally shows the change in daily solar energy over time at that latitude.
Latitude : As usual
Longitude: Time. Once around the Earth is a year.
Color: Solar energy per day
Here's what it looks like.
The maximum and minimum daily solar energies both occur at the poles, half a year apart. Here's the other pole, which has the same climate half a year out of phase.
As you can see, the equator is hot all year, the temperate zones are temperate, etc. I don't know why the sphere is so oblate: it seems to be just appearance, as the graph's axes seem to be correct. It's strange that the yellow and light blue bands are so narrow.