Glossary

You can access the IPCC glossary at http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg1/ar4-wg1-annexes.pdf

Climate can be defined as the collective state of the atmosphere for a given place over a specified interval of time. There are three parts to this definition:
1. Location, because climate can be defined for a globe, a continent, a region, or a city. Throughout most of this course we concentrate on global-scale climates.
2. Time, because climate must be defined over a specified interval. We will typically define the time scale we are dealing with in each lesson or example.
3. Averages and extremes of variables such as temperature, precipitation, pressure, and winds. In this course we focus on temperature, and occasionally both temperature and precipitation.