Weather vs. Climate

Weather:• Determines what

clothes we wear• Changes over

minutes, hours, days• Thunderstorm,

blizzard, hurricane, drought, heat wave, cold snap

Climate:• Determines what

crops we plant; when we plant, when we harvest

• Changes over seasons-decades-centuries

• Persistent (decades long) heat-wave or drought

Franklin County weather:January, 2010 Maximum Average Minimum TotalMax Temperature 54 °F 32 °F 15 °FMean Temperature 44 °F 24 °F 9 °FMin Temperature 33 °F 15 °F -5 °FPrecipitation 1.63 in 0.09 in 0.00 in 2.65 inWind 30 mph 5 mph 0 mphSea Level Pressure 30.31 in 29.90 in 29.23 in

July, 2010

Max Temperature 99 °F 85 °F 71 °F

Mean Temperature 85 °F 73 °F 57 °F

Min Temperature 73 °F 61 °F 46 °F

Precipitation 0.78 in 0.08 in 0.00 in 2.60 in

Wind 30 mph 3 mph 0 mph

Sea Level Pressure 30.21 in 29.94 in 29.69 inwww.wunderground.com

2010 Data

www.wunderground.com

New England Climate“humid continental” – Large seasonal distinctions– hot summers and cold winters

January:ColdPrecipitation comes from large stormsNor’easters—form in Gulf of Mexico and move up the northeast coast—lots of snow inland/rain on coast/wintry mix

July:WarmPrecipitation comes from thunderstorms T-storms form because the air is warm and humid; storms move from west to east. Slightly less precipitation in summer than in winter.

http://drought.unl.edu/whatis/climographsdomesticenglish.htm

Boston, MA Albany, NY

Average temperature and precipitation based on data from 1938 to 2001

Red line: annual global-mean temperature record Blue lines: 8-year trend lines (1 for each 8-year

period of data in the graph)http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/01/uncertainty-noise-and-the-art-of-model-data-comparison/

Red line: annual global-mean temperature record Blue lines: 15-year trend lines (1 for each 15-year period of data in the graph)

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/01/uncertainty-noise-and-the-art-of-model-data-comparison/

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata/GLB.Ts.txt

8 years of Global Temperature Anomalies plotted for three different time series

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata/GLB.Ts.txt

Web resources• The difference between weather and climate:

– http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/ctl/digging_weather.html– http://weathereye.kgan.com/cadet/climate/climate_vs.html– http://www.gcrio.org/gwcc/booklet1.html

• Scroll down to History and Almanac for climate/weather averages http://www.wunderground.com

• The NEW National Climate Service http://www.climate.gov• Retrieve plots of average weather conditions since 1895

http://www7.ncdc.noaa.gov/CDO/CDODivisionalSelect.jsp• Lots of data in tabular format

http://www.wxresearch.com/usnorm.htm • Global Temperature Data

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/