Climate versus weather

James Renwick is an experienced research meteorologist and climate research scientist. He knows a lot about weather and climate. Watch as he explains the similarities and differences.

Transcript

PROFESSOR JAMES RENWICK

Climate is what you expect, and weather is what you get. What we expect is the changing of the seasons and that difference between summer and winter year to year. There might be some ups and downs, but broadly speaking, things are like they were in the past or that’s – that’s the way it used to be at least. The weather is the day to day. It’s raining in Wellington today, it was sunny yesterday afternoon, and just the day-to-day ups and downs of temperatures, clouds, rain.

The one way to think about the climate is it’s just the average of all the weather. And in a way, that’s true, but there’s a bit more to it than that. Think about the changing seasons. Every year, we have summer and winter, with spring and autumn in between. It doesn’t actually matter what the weather is doing. It will be warmer in the summer regardless of the weather, and it will be colder in the winter regardless of the weather.

One good way of thinking about it is that they’re different timescales. The weather is day to day, and the climate is year to year and longer really – or season to season at least.

Acknowledgements Professor James Renwick, Victoria University of Wellington Aerial of sheep flock, NIWA Kiwi beach during summer, Brandon Bruce, released under CC BY-NC 3.0 Snowboarding, Kiwi Discovery, released under CC BY-NC 3.0

Acknowledgement

This resource has been produced with the support of the Ministry for the Environment and Stats NZ. (c) Crown Copyright.