Climate_Approaching_01

Step outside and you can learn a lot about your local weather. What does the weather right now tell you about?

What is climate?

One way to explain climate is that it is what you expect on any given day. Weather is what you end up with. For example, how hot or cold was it yesterday? How much did it rain? How strong did the wind blow? Climate then is the average weather at a given location.

Think about the last time you watched the weather on TV. Maybe you heard about it on the radio. You probably heard the term ‘the average temperature’. That does not mean it will be that temperature. You might be curious, what is an average? Average is a common term you may hear in a math class. So how do you find the average temperature on any given date. First, you will need to know the temperatures of that data for many years. Then you must divide that number by the number of years you have data for. Climate usually infers it is at least 30 years of data that is averaged.