El tiempo que hace

You met tiempo as time in chapter 5. Here is the other half of it: ¿qué tiempo hace? is what is the weather like.

The verb is hacer, to make, and it covers most of the everyday weather: hace frío, hace calor, hace sol, hace viento. Spanish has decided the weather is something the world does rather than something it is.

Except when it has not.

Three patterns, no rule

Rain and snow are verbs in their own right, and they only ever conjugate in the third person because nothing is doing them: llueve, nieva. There is no I rain.

Fog, cloud and storms take hay: hay niebla, hay tormenta. Things that exist rather than things that happen.

Conditions take estar: está nublado, está despejado. How the sky is at the moment.

Four sentences about the weather, three different constructions, and the only way through is to learn them as phrases rather than assemble them from parts.

caliente, calido, caluroso

Three words for hot and they are not interchangeable.

Caliente is hot to the touch. Coffee is caliente. Cálido is a warm climate, and warm in the figurative sense: una bienvenida cálida. Caluroso is hot weather, an uncomfortably hot day.

And hace calor is the sentence you will actually use, which sidesteps all three.

Be aware that estar caliente said of a person has a sexual meaning. If you are hot, say tengo calor.

The seasons

Primavera, verano, otoño, invierno. They take the article: en el verano, or often just en verano.

Otoño is autumn, and Spanish has no equivalent of the American fall, which is worth knowing because it is one of the few places where British English is the closer match.

Temporada is a season in the other sense: a sporting season, a tourist season, the season for asparagus. Never one of the four.