Study of the major components of Earth's climate system and climate change history. Discussion of 21st century climate change prediction, mitigation and adaptation efforts.

What are weather and climate? Most people think they know but if you ask people to explain the differences and similarities you're bound to get a range of answers. Weather affects not just our daily activities but other important aspects of society such as transportation, commerce, security and agriculture. Most people understand what weather is to some extent. Climate and climate change are concepts that evoke strong emotional responses from people but are less well understood. In this class, students examine fundamental issues such as the greenhouse effect, severe weather, and global weather patterns and how they relate to a changing climate. Instruction in the lectures will provide the basic knowledge needed to understand these issues. In the discussion sections, students will be divided into groups to address the implications of these topics through group projects.

Laboratory exercises to supplement AOSC200, including weather observations, weather map analysis, forecasting practice and climate modeling.

A comprehensive introduction to scientific computation and visualization techniques with Python applied to data intensive questions in the Natural Sciences. The class emphasizes real-world applications, providing students with essential hands-on experience using Python for data analysis and visualization, developing analytical skills for observational and modeling data, and performing virtual experiments to distinguish data contributing factors. Students will gain an understanding of the scientific data issues including: signal vs noise, trend vs periodicity, mean vs extreme changes, and accuracy vs uncertainty. Students will gain extensive experience using command line linux. Skills including local and remote file transfer and synchronization, file and directory permission, utilities for diagnosing performance issues, and data compression.