what is one important difference between weather and climate
Answers
Both weather and climate refer to local conditions (temperature, rainfall, wind strength, etc.) in a particular location or region, but the main difference between them is a matter of time. “Weather” refers to local conditions on the scale of minutes, hours, days, and even months to years: you can have a particularly wet month, warm winter, or rainy decade. “Climate” is an average of weather conditions over 30 years or more, and can be assessed for a single location, large area, or globally.
Both weather and climate refer to local conditions (temperature, rainfall, wind strength, etc.) in a particular location or region, but the main difference between them is a matter of time. “Weather” refers to local conditions on the scale of minutes, hours, days, and even months to years: you can have a particularly wet month, warm winter, or rainy decade. “Climate” is an average of weather conditions over 30 years or more, and can be assessed for a single location, large area, or globally. While weather can change dramatically in a single location from day to day (for example, cold and rainy one day, followed by hot, dry conditions the next day), climate generally changes less quickly because it represents the average of weather conditions over a longer period of time.
In the United States, weather has been measured directly by people for over 140 years, meaning that sufficiently long records exist to also track modern climate in detail over the same time period. To track both weather and modern climate, geoscientists measure temperature over land and in the ocean, air pressure, humidity, rainfall and snowfall, wind speed, sunshine, and many other factors.Additional helpful information to track climate can include the frequency of record-breaking temperatures or rainfall events, the length of growing seasons, size of Arctic and Antarctic sea ice, trends in monthly weather averages over several decades, and many other aspects of the Earth system. Geoscientists also estimate past climate during times before direct weather measurements by analyzing data from tree rings, coral reefs, ice cores, and many other parts of the geologic record.