Yet there is more than just global warming on his mind. Hobbs, a UW atmospheric sciences professor, hopes to find data in the skies that will pin down better predictions of what the climate will be in the future. Hobbs is part of the new world of climate prediction, a world made possible by supercomputers and weather observations made on land, on the sea, in the sky and in space. Since the early 1990s this emerging science has undergone such rapid growth that today 10 institutions worldwide are making relatively reliable climate predictions. Well, it isn't weather.
Weather is something that happens in days, or at the most two weeks, and then is gone.
Weather is tomorrow's high winds, next weekend's rain or next month's sunshine. Climate is summer and winter, it is months or even years during which global movements of hot and cold ocean waters and air masses go through cycles that can bring droughts or floods. If weather forecasting is cause and effect on the shortest possible time scale, then climate prediction indicates the global conditions in the oceans and the atmosphere for years ahead. Weather is what you get. Medium-term predictions involving changes in climate that can persist for decades.