Tom Mitchell's recent post about "mapping" potential growing areas for certain plants reminds me that a few years ago, a NARGS member named Marcel Jouseau developed such a map to identify potential sites for Aquilegia jonesii, a dwarf species of restricted distribution in mountains of the inland West of North America, and with his model in hand, went looking for it in the identified places. He actually found some populations that had not been documented previously, and wrote this up. I'll see if I can unearth the exact article if anyone's interested. I don't think Marcel used the internet to do this work, because Google Earth didn't exist then. There are a lot of other climatological information sites maintained by different national governments, and if you Google "climate" plus a place name you will find some good things. Incidentally Oxford University Press is preparing a new edition of their useful "Encyclopedia of Climate and Weather" (I copyedited the first edition, so I have it here), which should include a lot of new information relevant to this kind of inquiry. In addition to the book Bracey mentioned, a good source is Martyn Rix's "Growing Bulbs," which I've mentioned here before as one of my favorite bulb books. It covers the world's various geophyte-hosting climates quite well in gardener's terms. It is out of print but copies seem easy to find. Jane McGary