Document Type

Syllabus

Publication Date

Spring 2024

Course Description

This course is about the Earth's atmosphere, how it works, and how it changes through time. The importance of this topic cannot be overstated: Earth's atmosphere enables life as we know it to exist on the planet, so understanding how the atmosphere works, and how it interacts with other aspects of the Earth system, is vital to our well-being. It is a critically important topic today, because the changes humankind is making to our atmosphere may have dire consequences for our well-being in the near future. Weather, climate, and climate change are deeply intertwined. They are somewhat different beasts, however. Whereas weather is the short-term variability associated with rapid changes in atmospheric conditions, climate is the long-term average state of the atmosphere in space and time. In this class, we will be exploring aspects of both weather and climate simultaneously, culminating with an examination of global climate change.

We will begin by exploring the governing physical principles of weather and climate. Once we understand these basic governing principles, we can apply them to the atmosphere. Rigorous study of weather and climate necessarily involves a lot of physics and a lot of math. My goal for this course is to avoid a rigorous quantitative treatment of the subject in favor of a more conceptual approach—it is unlikely that many of you are planning to become professional meteorologists! The study of weather and climate science also involves a fair amount of terminology, most of which will be new to you. You will need to learn the language of atmospheric science in order to understand it, so be prepared to spend some time improving your science vocabulary. Regardless of your academic or professional interests, I think you’ll find that the basic physical principles you learn in this class are useful to your everyday life beyond just weather and climate. Study of the atmosphere, like any science, is full of transferable knowledge!

Student Outcomes

By the end of this course, you should be able to:

  • Understand weather and climate data and use them to make basic predictions.
  • Explain how changes in the physical state of the atmosphere produce weather.
  • Recognize various forms of evidence for climate change through Earth history.
  • Describe the causes of past, present, and future climate change.
  • Read, interpret, create, and analyze scientific maps and diagrams.
  • See the Earth as a complex physical, chemical, and biological system.

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