PREREQUISITES:
MATH140, AOSC/GEOG/GEOL123, or permission of department.
Recommended: MATH141, PHYS141, PHYS171, or PHYS161. Also offered as GEOG346, GEOL346.
- None
DESCRIPTION:
This is a comprehensive introductory course designed to prepare students to identify, interpret, and visualize Earth’s climate variations observed in the past and projected into the future. The class emphasizes real-world applications, providing students with essential hands-on experience using MATLAB 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 issues concerning the modern global warming debate on detection and attribution including: signal vs noise, trend vs periodicity, natural vs anthropogenic forcing, local vs remote response, mean vs extreme changes, and accuracy vs uncertainty.
This course has two overarching components: first, students will learn how to program with MATLAB, and second, students will learn statistical and spectral methods of analyzing data. These two components will be bridged with homework plus exercise assignments utilizing both mathematical and programming skills to examine Earth’s climate data, both observed and modeled, accessible to the public. The analysis and programing skills learned can be more generally applied to other scientific data with variations in time and/or space.