The University of British Columbia

Course Description

Characteristics and physical processes of thunderstorms, tornadoes, lightning, hail, hurricanes, blizzards, cyclones and other storms.

UBC Calendar

For a full listing of course offerings please see the UBC calendar description

Learning Goals

Aim

• This is a course on practical meteorology.
• It is designed for students and professionals in science and engineering who want to understand and use basic concepts, but who don't need to derive the equations.
• These concepts are demonstrated in the context of storms.
• This course serves both as a terminal meteorology course for science & engineering students, and as an entry course for atmospheric-science (ATSC) majors.

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Goals:

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

• Enjoy the beauty and power of storms without fear. (Affective)
• Describe the characteristics and evolution of: (Cognitive)
  • thunderstorms (lightning, thunder, tornadoes, hail, rain, downbursts, gust fronts)
  • mid-latitude cyclones (lows, fronts, air masses)
  • hurricanes
  • general circulation (global climate, jet streams, Rossby waves)
• Use the following meteorological tools skillfully to diagnose the atmospheric condition:  (Psychomotor)
  • radar images
  • satellite images
  • weather maps
  • thermo diagrams (for temperature soundings & stability)
  • hodographs (for wind soundings)
  • METARs (weather reports)
  • Excel (for calculations and graphs)
• Forecast your local weather by looking at the sky, identifying the clouds, and using the meteorological tools. (Psychomotor)
• Explain the role of dynamics (forces and winds) and thermodynamics (heat and moisture) in atmospheric processes and phenomena. (Cognitive)
• Relate atmospheric phenomena to the equations that describe them. (Cognitive)
• Reliably compute numerical answers in the face of missing data and mismatched units, and to qualitatively interpret the result. (Psychomotor & Cognitive)
• Defend and criticize meteorological issues (such as why perfect forecast skill is impossible for a chaotic fluid like the atmosphere). (Cognitive)

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Approach

• There will be lots of interaction with your classmates during the class meetings -- an approach called "peer instruction."
• Also, based on a couple warm-up exercises that you do online the day before each class, I will learn which topics you are having difficulty with, and will focus my lectures on those topics -- an approach called "just-in-time teaching."

This course is part of EOS-SEI, the EOS Science Education Initiative.

 

Instructors

Roland Stull

 

Textbook

Required are 1 textbook  and 1 i-clicker:

• Textbook:  Stull, 2011: "Meteorology for Scientists & Engineers, 3rd Ed." Cengage Publ. (If this book is not yet published by Cengage, then pre-publication copies will be made available by the author instead.)
• i-clicker: The "i-clicker" brand of personal response system has been adopted UBC-wide. We will use it extensively during each lecture. 

These materials are available at the Discount Textbooks store, located on University Blvd 2 blocks off campus, on the second floor of the building containing McDonald's restaurant. I ordered these materials at Discount Textbooks because Discount Textbooks sells them at lower cost than at the UBC Bookstore.

 

Course Content

See the course home page for all info.

 

Lecture Topics

Week	Topics
1	Introduction; meteorological conventions & fundamentals; tools such as Excel
2	Thunderstorms; weather radar
3	Interpreting radar images; atmospheric radiation; forces acting on the air
4	Hodograph; winds; continuity; vorticity
5	Tornadoes; helicity; lightning & thunder
6	More lightning & thunder; Lagrangian & Eulerian heat budgets
7	Moisture: saturation & variables; moisture budets: Lagrangian & Eulerian; hail
8	Thermo diagrams: components, types, thermodynamic state, applications; soundings; static stability, CAPE
9	Downbursts & gust fronts; weather satellites.
10	Cloud identification; global circulation - characteristics and forcings; jet stream; Rossby waves
11	Airmasses, synoptic weather maps, fronts, extratropical cyclone evolution
12	More midlatitude cyclones - case studies; cyclone: spin-up, upward motion, and pressure decrease; West-coast weather
13	Hurricanes: characteristics, evolution, thermodynamics, dynamics. Review.

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Labs

(no lab)