<p>The intrinsic stability of regional climates is a critical area of study in an era of global environmental change. While traditional hydro-meteorological models are effective for forecasting, the strategic dynamics that govern a climate’s character are often overlooked. In this study, a novel game-theoretic framework is introduced to diagnose a local atmosphere’s internal stability versus the influence of external forcing. Evolutionary Game Theory (EGT) is applied to a 12-year, 3-hourly climate record from Agartala, India, through the definition of four discrete atmospheric states and the construction of an empirical payoff matrix from their transition probabilities. A profound divergence between two modelling approaches is revealed by the analysis. The EGT model, designed to isolate the system’s internal dynamics, predicts a perfectly neutral Evolutionary Stable Strategy (ESS) with a 0.25 proportion for all states. Conversely, a standard linear Markovian model using the same data is found to accurately forecast the empirically observed, skewed climate, where ‘Cloudy &amp; Dry’ conditions dominate at 0.42. This result demonstrates the unique diagnostic power of the proposed framework: the neutral ESS serves as a theoretical baseline, proving that Agartala’s climate is not a closed system. Instead, it is shown to be overwhelmingly governed by external drivers, such as the monsoon, that constantly push it away from its inherently neutral equilibrium. This methodology offers a powerful new tool for disentangling internal resilience from external forcing in any climate system.&#xa0;</p>