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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
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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: www.wunderground.com
2010 Data www.wunderground.com
New England Climate “humid continental” • Large seasonal distinctions • hot summers and cold winters January: Cold Precipitation comes from large storms Nor’easters—form in Gulf of Mexico and move up the northeast coast—lots of snow inland/rain on coast/wintry mix July: Warm Precipitation 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.
Boston, MA Albany, NY Average temperature and precipitation based on data from 1938 to 2001 http://drought.unl.edu/whatis/climographsdomesticenglish.htm
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/
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/