What is the difference between climate and weather?

I live in Florida. We have a humid subtropical climate. It will not snow where I live until there is a drastic change in climate. We get a significant amount of rain during the course of the year (54 inches), and the average temperature is somewhere in the mid-80s.

Today, it was partly sunny and 83 degrees Fahrenheit. It did not rain at all.

Weather is a snapshot. Climate is the running pattern.

This is an extremely simplified version of the answer.

Weather: What’s the weather like where you are today? Warm? Cold? Snowy?

Climate: Is it generally warm where you are in December? Do you get cold and fog in December? Or do you get winds out of Canada that meet with warm air out of the Gulf and make it good for growing winter wheat?

In an arid climate, it is generally dry. It’s dry most of the time. But that doesn’t mean it can’t ever rain. When it rains, that’s weather. A certain kind of weather might last just a little while, but the climate stays the same (or takes a long period of time to change).

It’s a lot like a person’s disposition and mood. A person can have a cheerful disposition and still be in a bad mood now and then. The disposition would be the climate; the mood would be the weather.

The climate is where the weather/atmospheric events occur. They are mutually inclusive of each other and depending on the latitude of their location weather events will vary. Simply put do not expect blizzards in the Florida Keys or typhoons in the arctic.

To me the difference is a matter of time or duration. Climate describes the parameters of the weather overall, whereas the weather is about fluctuating changes within (and occasionally outside) those parameters.

Weather is what has the week been like, climate is what has the millennium been like.

Weather is about what it is today,and what it is going to be like for the next week. Climate is what it’s been like generally. year after decade after century.

Simplified, climate is the likelihood of weather.

From my father in law who was a hydro physicist who concentrated on ocean and river currents, floods and drought.
“If you notice it, it is weather. If it is a collection of measured trends over years, it is climate.”

Weather is the day to day atmospheric condition of a region and it is measured over a short span of time, whereas climate is the specific atmospheric condition, encompassing a much larger region and measured over a long period of time.