Earliest studies of climatology centered on simple descriptions of local weather and climate. With growing number of observations, scientists strived to quantify climates by summarizing records taken at various locations and introduced the concept of the climatic normal, an average taken over at least a 30-year period. This time period was considered “sufficient” to provide a measure of climate at a particular location. Such summaries have been deemed problematic, however, as they incorrectly assume that climates do not change over time and that the depiction of climate may be adequately expressed through the series of basic long term statistics of weather (e.g., Bryson, 1997; Lovejoy and Schertzer, 2013).