Weather and climate.. What is the difference between the two terms?

ArabiaWeather.com - We often hear or read the words "weather and climate" without realizing the difference between them, so we confuse the two expressions to the point that we do not consider or even do not realize if there is a real difference between the two terms or not!

So what is the weather and what is the climate?

The term weather is applied to the state of the atmosphere in a place over a short period of time, while the climate is a summary of the weather conditions of any place for a period of time that may extend to a month or a season of seasons and their distribution system throughout the year.

The term "weather" is also applied to the state of the atmosphere resulting from fluctuations in the atmospheric layer close to the Earth's surface, which is the "troposphere" layer, whose thickness ranges from 15 km above the equator to 8 km above the poles during a short period of time that extends from minutes to several months. Sometimes, it directly affects people's daily lives in terms of movement and feeling cold and hot. Weather manifestations include clouds, rain, snow, winds, hurricanes, cold, heat, humidity and atmospheric pressure.

Weather forecasting is one of the most important daily issues in various media sectors. It is updated periodically more than once a day, due to the changes that occur in the weather conditions continuously. Weather forecasting depends on a huge amount of information that is entered into computers for analyzing weather data that are received from thousands of stations around the world that monitor current weather values and elements.

Special computers analyze weather data, which are called "supercomputers", and they are few in number around the world. These high-speed devices also produce forecast weather data within global numerical models, based on their maps, weather forecasts are issued for a period of one hour to several weeks. But the accuracy of the weather forecast usually decreases after four days gradually.

As for the climate, it is a description of weather phenomena for a long period of time, usually taken for a period of 30 years for a specific region, where the rates of the weather elements are taken for this region in terms of precipitation rates, maximum and minimum temperatures, the prevailing wind pattern, in addition to the percentage of humidity and the percentage of sunlight.

According to the climate elements of a particular region, the manifestations and types of vegetation cover, the amount of surface and groundwater are determined, in addition to temperature rates and types of precipitation, such as rain or snow, and thus it is directly reflected in the economic and social lifestyle of this region.