Dyson Sphere/Net

It depends on a lot of factors. The good news, from the point of view of your story, is that a civilization capable of building this sort of structure at all would also be capable of designing it to produce all sorts of different meteorological conditions.

If the habitat is orbiting so that the effective gravity is zero, that would tend to make the weather blander. If the habitat is relatively small, say a few kilometers in every direction, that would also make the weather blander. You probably wouldn't get much in the way of clouds or rain then, unless some mechanism were built to produce them. In a larger habitat with something like Earth-normal effective gravity, you'd be more likely to get clouds and rain spontaneously.

Air pressure could be anything the designers of the habitat wanted it to be. If they wanted seasons, I think they'd have to go out of their way to create them. Maybe they could build a shade over the bubble that sometimes partially blocked the sunlight; then there would be a "winter" of sorts.

I'm afraid I can't think of any resources that are specifically devoted to this question. Making a detailed weather model for this sort of habitat is no easy task, since so many different factors come in. (How transparent is the bubble to infrared radiation? What are the thermal characteristics of the ground inside the bubble? Are there extensive bodies of liquid water on the inside surface? And so on.) But maybe you could look at more general sources on meteorology and climatology, and they might give you some ideas.

Climate on Earth is influenced by two major phenomenons: solar heating and rotation of the Earth.

In solar heating (or atmospheric circulation) energy from the sun hits the equator. This warms the air, which begins to rise. Warm air holds more water and as it rises it cools and releases water as rain, hence tropical rain-forests. The now cooler air begins to sink but as it gets closer to the Earth it warms and begins to draw moisture, which is why some of the major deserts occur at 30 degrees latitude. The warm-again air rises and cools again, dropping moisture at about 60 degrees latitude, causing the temperate rain-forests (ex, Washington State and Chile).

The rotation of the Earth causes the Coriolis Effect, which is the deflection of the winds to the east and west and causes the tradewinds and the jetstreams.

Geography will also influence climate, such as rainshadows in the lee of mountains. Large bodies of water will also influence it.

I know your question is about weather, which is the current state of the atmosphere, whereas climate is atmospheric conditions over a long period of time. However weather is dependent on climate and is driven by changes in pressure and temperature and the differences can be caused by the angle of the sun at a particular spot and varies by latitude.

So for there to be weather on your habitat I think you would have to have some variation on the surface in regards to how much solar radiation is hitting it. If your habitat is oriented so that the sun is at a right angle to the surface then the entire surface will be getting the same amount of solar radiation. It seems to me that there wouldn't be any weather if the surface is evenly heated. I'm also of the mind that if a civilization has the level of technology to create habitats they could also create weather patterns as well.

Also, it is sad that when I first saw Dyson Sphere I thought of the vacuum?

The big problem is the gravity. The net gravity is toward the star, so there would have to be a structure to keep the air near the surface, or the air would have to be on the outside, where there would be little light. Domes, etc. would help, but they wouldn't correct the problem.

One, did you see the Dyson Sphere episode of Star Trek? Maybe name it something else, since Star Trek is the Bible of science fiction. Cool concept, but it's JUST the name.
http://en.memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Dyson_sphere

Also, if you had some sort of concentrated gravity source, like dark matter. If they can make a space ship to sustain the human race, I bet they can make dark matter. I'd go with a dark matter core, and some sort of computer program which simulates Earth's weather patterns.

Dyson sphere is named after the physicist who thought it up, not star trek. So it's fair game.

If you have a civilization capable of creating an actual dyson sphere, then they can definitely manipulate the weather. The only way to make weather not in their control is to make the population people who lived on the dyson sphere after the original creators left or they are descendants without the knowledge of their forerunners.

I wouldn't worry about the name having been used in Star Trek. It's been used in a zillion other things too. I was just reading a Marvel comic book this weekend and Tony Stark was building one.

I would maybe change the name a bit because if I hear Dyson Sphere I think of the totally enclosed (barring exits/entrances for spacecraft) hollow shell. But there are some variations on that which might cover what you're describing and may fit it better.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere#Variants

Writer MMS said:

Dyson sphere is named after the physicist who thought it up, not star trek. So it's fair game.

Click to expand...

Dyson didn't actually come up with the concept. That was a writer, Olaf Stapledon, in a 1937 book. Dyson wrote a paper in 1960 on the theoretical possibilities of such a structure and popularised it, but credits Stapledon as being the originator of the idea.