People’s lives and activities take place in, are linked to and cannot be carried out without a particular environment. In addition to geographical and geological conditions, weather and climate make up a large part of the environment, if we are talking only about inanimate nature.
There is no human process that is independent of weather or climate.
Weather and climate, the weather complex, are always linked to a particular place. A weather complex consists of similar or uniform weather over several days. A complex is not a loose formation, it is a regularity, a system of similar weather patterns.
Climate is a set of “weather complexes”. It adds up not just a few days of weather, but also many years of weather. Climate covers the totality of weather: what is possible and what is actually observed in a given place over a very long period of time.
The climate captures the typical changes in weather, diurnal and annual variations. Climate is a complex system that changes and evolves in response to the changes and evolution of other spheres: the cryosphere, the atmosphere, the biosphere, the geosphere and others.
All of these make up the global climate system, and although Lithuania’s climate is an integral part of the global climate, it is simply not possible to describe and analyse all the climate systems when studying the factors that shape the climate of the regions, so the analysis is usually confined to a single system, the atmosphere.
To a simplified climate system, we need to add the general atmospheric circulation and water cycle, solar radiation and the country’s geographical position.
The process of climate cognition includes the analysis of the listed climate processes, the characterisation of the climate-forming elements, the search for anomalies and phenomena in climate features, and climate zonation.