Weather vs climate: What's the difference?

Weather

Weather shows the way the atmosphere behaves and can change from minute-to-minute, hour-to-hour and day-to-day. There are many components to weather, which include temperature, rain, wind, hail, snow, humidity, flooding, thunderstorms, heatwaves and more. When you look outside your window on any given day, what you see is weather.

Climate

Climate, on the other hand, is the weather in a specific area over a long period of time – usually 30 years of more. When scientists talk about climate, they look for trends or cycles of variability, such as changes in temperature, humidity, precipitation, ocean-surface temperature and other weather phenomena that occur over longer periods of time in a specific location.

How does the climate change?

While changes in weather can occur in minutes, climate changes over longer periods of time. Climate events, like El Niño, happen over several years, with larger fluctuations happening over decades. And, even larger climate changes happen over hundreds and thousands of years.

Today, our climate is changing. Earth's climate is warming due to increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concludes in its Special Report: Global Warming of 1.5°C, that: “human-induced warming reached approximately 1°C (above pre-industrial levels) in 2017, increasing at around 0.2°C per decade.”

The effects of climate warming will be felt by millions of people all around the world as crops could suffer, water supplies could dwindle and sea levels rise. Both land and marine ecosystems will be affected, with potential for far-reaching consequences for all life on our planet.

Learn the difference between weather and climate in this episode of ‘Meet the experts’ where Andrew Shepherd, a leading scientist from the University of Leeds, explains the role of space in studying changes to our planet in real time and in the future.