TedEd: Is the weather actually becoming more extreme?

A TedEd by R. Saravanan

In the past 40 years, the number of extreme weather events has been steadily increasing. But the question is, are these just bad weather patterns, or deeper changes to our climate? First, we should define the differences between weather and climate. Weather is defined as the atmospheric conditions at a specific point in time and a place. Right now, we can get fairly accurate weather predictions for about a week. Climate is the atmospheric condition in a region over a much longer period of time. Climate forecasts predict average weather patterns over time instead of specific types of weather. These two things are forecasted using different data sets. For weather, the conditions used are current precipitation, air pressure, humidity, and wind speed and direction. Twice a day, weather balloons with devices called radiosondes are released into the air to measure these conditions and transmit them to weather stations. Meteorologists can use this data in models that generate the forecast you see. The reason they are sometimes inaccurate is that weather is a chaotic system that is very sensitive to tiny details that are near impossible to have. Within just weeks, small changes in conditions can change weather patterns, like the butterfly effect. Climate forecasts are different, partially because they take an average of weather patterns and because they base their data on the range of possible outcomes. These boundary conditions constrain the possible weather and climate patterns. We can average these to get accurate climate models for years to come. The catch is that small changes to boundary conditions can make affect the chaotic weather systems. For example, the 1 degree celsius that the Earth's temperature has increased by has had the effect of 1M nukes in our atmosphere. These shifts do, in fact, increase the amount of extreme weather on our planet. This is what climate change is, but we can help combat it by examining changing boundary conditions and figuring out how to reverse our effects on the planet.