Importance of Weather

Scenes of flooding and storms show us just how much weather and climate can affect our lives.

Climate affects nearly every aspect of our lives, from our food sources to our transport infrastructure, from what clothes we wear, to where we go on holiday. It has a huge effect on our livelihoods, our health, and our future.

Climate is the long-term pattern of weather conditions in any particular place.

We know that our climate is changing due to humans, and these changes are already having a big impact on our lives.

It’s important that we understand how the climate is changing, so that we can prepare for the future.

Studying the climate helps us predict how much rain the next winter might bring, or how far sea levels will rise due to warmer sea temperatures.

We can also see which regions are most likely to be affected by extreme weather, or which wildlife species are threatened by climate change.

Climate is the long-term pattern of weather experienced in a place.

Weather, on the other hand, describes day-to-day changes in our atmosphere.

You can check the weather by simply looking out the window. But you need a longer term set of observations to understand the climate.

We describe the climate by looking at temperature, rainfall, snow and wind data. This is usually averaged over seasons, years, decades, centuries or more.

If you looked at the average rainfall records for Manchester over the last thirty years, it would help to describe the climate for the area.

It’s always handy to pack an umbrella in England, as the climate makes rain very common

Climate is influenced by things like location, whether there are mountains nearby, whether there is water nearby, and how high up it is.

For example, one of the reasons Carlisle has a colder, wetter climate than London because it is further away from the equator. Another reason is that it is closer to mountains, and mountains often encourage rainfall.

Climate is also affected by our atmosphere, a layer of gases that surrounds the earth.

These gases act like a blanket wrapped around the earth, trapping the sun’s heat within our atmosphere.

Some gases trap more heat than others. The gases that trap the most heat are called greenhouse gases because they allow heat to reach the earth, but do not let it escape – similar to how a greenhouse works.

The most common greenhouse gases are carbon dioxide, methane and ozone, water vapour, nitrous oxides and fluorinated gases.

The more greenhouse gases there are, the warmer the earth’s climate becomes.

This means that human activities which release greenhouse gases, like burning fossil fuels, lead to climate change.

Weather can be defined as the physical condition or state of the atmosphere at a particular time and place.

Most weather happens in the part of the earth’s surface called the troposphere

temperature, pressure, wind, humidity, and precipitation interact with each other.

they influence the atmospheric conditions like the direction and velocity of the wind, amount of insolation, cloud cover, and the amount of precipitation.

these are known as elements of both weather and climate. the influence of these elements differs from place to place and time to time.

it may be restricted to a small area and for a small duration of time,we very often describe the influence of weather elements in name of weather such as sunny, hot, warm, cold, fine depending upon the dominant element of weather at a place and point in time.

therefore, the weather is the atmospheric condition of a place for a short duration with respect to its one or more elements.

two places even a short distance apart may have different kinds of weather at one and the same time

Importance of weather:

Good weather improves people’s lives

Weather determines the kind of clothing to be worn by people in an area.

Knowledge of the weather of a place enables people to carry out economic activities which can be sustained by the weather in that place. e.g. dairy cattle do well in a cool and wet place.

By studying the weather of a place over a long time, we can establish its climate.