Introduction

Meteorology is the scientific study of the atmosphere. It’s mainly used to forecast weather and understand our planet’s climate.

A quick note about weather and climate: these words are often used interchangeably, but scientifically speaking, they’re different phenomena.

Weather refers to the short-term conditions of the atmosphere, such as temperature, humidity, and wind speed. These can change rapidly day by day, or even hour by hour.

Climate, on the other hand, describes the long-term conditions of the atmosphere, typically averaged over a period of 30 years or more.

Take Burkina Faso — the hottest country on Earth. Between 1960 and 1991, the average temperature was 83 °F (28 °C). That's the country’s climate: the average conditions over a period of time. If we wanted to talk about weather, we might focus instead on a rainy morning in the winter of 1981.

Meteorology has a long history. The earliest treatise on the subject, Aristotle's Meteorologica, was written in 340 BCE. And it’s easy to understand why. Since the dawn of humanity, weather and climate have profoundly influenced our lives.

Think about all the food we produce: those crops need sun and water. If we don’t plant them in a place with a warm, wet climate, they might not be able to grow.

And what about transport and navigation? If we fail to predict that a storm is brewing, we might send out a ship, and lose it in the choppy seas.

Hail can damage buildings. Rainfall can flood towns. And in some cases, the weather is a matter of life or death. In 1972, an Iranian blizzard covered 200 villages and killed 4000 people. More recently, in the summer of 2003, a European heatwave killed 70,000 people.

That’s why meteorology matters. We can’t change the weather — not yet, anyway — but by studying the atmosphere, we’re able to predict how different phenomena will behave.

We can use this information to warn communities about upcoming threats, advise farmers about harvests, or even just explain why tomorrow morning might be a good time to go to the beach.