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Introduction to climate and weather
True or false? Climate is statistics of the weather during the last year.
- You cold? - Yeah. That talk about global warming is just nonsense. It's not supposed to be this cold in April. But, Philip! What?
You confuse climate and weather. They're not the same. The climate can get warmer, while simultaneously, the weather is occasionally chilly. What? How?
Yes, climate and weather are not the same thing, but they are connected. Kim likes to keep track of the weather, and goes to a weather station every day... ... measures the temperature... ... observes the air pressure and wind ... notes if it's sunny... ...
or cloudy... ... measures humidity, and precipitation... ... and counts lightning strikes. All these are examples of weather observations. Kim intends to do such observations every day, for thirty years!
Every day, new notes, about the weather. Then Kim calculates the mean values of everything measured. What is the temperature at eight o'clock in the morning, on average, in the town where Kim and Philip live? And how many sunny days are there on average every year? Kim gathers statistics about the weather, for thirty years.
And using those statistics, it's possible to describe the climate. Climate is statistics over a long time. Weather is individual measurements, over a few hours or days. There are weather stations all over the world, which take measurements at regular intervals, maybe once an hour. Often there is no-one there reading the instruments.
They operate automatically and send the results to computers, which assemble all the information. Together all the measurements provide a picture of how the weather in different places in the world is, right now, and what the weather might be, over the next few hours, or days. And after a long time, you have collected statistics on the weather, and you can describe the climate. And it is fully possible that the climate in a location can become warmer, that is the average temperature over the last thirty years, can rise... ... while at the same time, the weather on some days is unusually cold.