Climatology is the science of climate, or the study of long-term atmospheric conditions across Earth. Unlike meteorology, which uses data to predict weather over several days, climate science focuses on identifying patterns across 55 essential climate variables over periods of 30 years or more. These patterns help climatologists better understand the interactions between Earth's systems and refine computational models to predict future phenomena.
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Unlike meteorology, which focuses on weather forecasting over several days, climatology identifies trends in data over periods of 30 or more years. This data can go back millions of years and help refine models to forecast centuries into the future.
Essential climate variables include physical, chemical, and biological variables that meaningfully contribute to Earth's climate and how it changes with time. Many of these variables influence one another through feedback mechanisms across Earth's atmosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, biosphere, and geosphere.
Historically rooted in Greek philosophy, its ideas used the latitudes where people were located to justify racial hierarchies, casting tropical peoples as lazy or inferior. These biases still influence how media and research portray people in climatically disadvantaged regions.
Scientists use satellites, balloons, ocean buoys, and land-based instruments to track climate variables like temperature, precipitation, and wind. These tools gather data from deep ocean waters to the upper atmosphere.
Scientists use physical, chemical, and biological materials preserved in sediments, ice, and fossils to infer historical climate data. These proxies are studied and calibrated against modern climate conditions to interpret ancient environments accurately.
The width and shape of tree rings reflect yearly growth conditions like rainfall or snowfall. Scars in the rings can record disruptions such as fires, avalanches, or earthquakes, explaining when and how those events occurred.
These columns of ice house microscopic air bubbles with ancient atmospheric samples trapped within compressed layers of snowfall. The oldest ice cores provide data from over 800,000 years ago.
By analyzing materials such as pollen and algae within the layers of these cores, which are collected from lakes and oceans, scientists can learn what the environment and climate were like when that layer formed.
Speleothems like stalactites and stalagmites form when water deposits minerals after a cave rises above the water table and fills with air. These formations preserve the mineral deposits, which may serve as climate proxies, for as long as a million years.
Measures of the abundance of carbon-13 and carbon-12 can vary in a sample due to environmental and climatic factors. Plants more readily assimilate carbon-12 during photosynthesis, allowing the ratio to serve as a proxy for past conditions that favored plant life.
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