Understanding the Weather
What weather is
Find out what weather is, and how it changes what we wear and do.
On a cold winter morning you shiver and pull on a sweater. In summer you pick cool clothes. Your body is sensing the weather.
Weather is the state of the Earth's atmosphere at a particular time and place. Both matter: it might be hot in Jaipur right now and raining in Mumbai at the same moment.
The atmosphere is the layer of gases around the Earth. We call these gases air. It has several layers, like a cake. The lowest layer, closest to the ground, is the troposphere. That's where plants, animals and people live and breathe, and where almost all weather happens.
The troposphere is 6 to 18 km thick. It is thinner at the poles, where cold air shrinks, and thicker in the tropics, where warm air spreads out. Think of how you curl up small under a blanket in winter, but sprawl out on a hot night: air does the same.
We describe weather with words like hot, cold, rainy, cloudy, humid, snowy, windy. These describe its five elements:
| Element | What it means |
|---|---|
| temperature | how hot or cold the air is |
| precipitation | water falling from the sky: rain, snow, sleet (frozen or half-frozen rain), hail (small hard balls of ice) |
| atmospheric pressure | the weight of the air above us |
| wind | moving air: its speed and direction |
| humidity | how much water vapour (water as a gas) is in the air |
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