The difference between weather and climate can be really confusing, but one way to remember it is: climate is what you’d expect, and weather is what you get.

Weather is what we get, day to day, and this varies in the short term. Climate is the long term average of the weather patterns we experience, usually taken over 30 years or longer.

The long term average gives us a sense of what we can expect the weather to be.

For example, you’d say that Darwin has a hot climate and Hobart has a cool climate. You would expect the weather to be much hotter in Darwin than in Hobart because of the average temperatures over a long period of time. But you could still get a day where it is hotter in Hobart than in Darwin.