Welcome to PHYS 410/510: Stuff about the Atmosphere

This is a self contained web site. The Canvas site only exists as a front end to this website. Navigation of this web site is as follows:

• The Syllabus Link takes you to the course syllabus that might contain some useful information.
  
  
• The Modules Link contains the table of contents for all of the course content. If at any time you get lost, simply click on the Modules to find your self again.
  
  
• The Course Assignments Link will take you to where the assignments are posted. Homework assignments can be done collaboratively.
  
  

This course is fluid. There is no reason to be syllaballastic. I don't know yet what kinds of topics we will cover and in some cases material will be posted after the class happens and not before - for the pedagogical reasons stated above.

Overall, this course is operating under the working assumption that physics students at the UO know very little about the physics of "natural systems" (because we don't teach any of that here). As a result, I am far more interested in developing your atmospheric and climate science literacy, than overwhelming you with derivations. So this course will not look like this:

So I am going to teach this class in a way that will be unfamiliar to you, at least initially. Rather than deriving stuff first, we are instead going to think about what piece of physics might apply to an issue in atmospheric thermodynamics, transport, circulation, radiative transfer, etc. Indeed, the simple question "How does rain occur" has many non-trivial answers. So the intent is to think about how we can model some aspect of the physical system and discuss that and only after that, perform the relevant derivation, based on the assumptions we made. This is really how science is done.

I feel that in too many physics courses there is one derivation after another and the only thing one really learns is a)notation and b) how to apply math. Generally this means the math gets in the way of achieving physical understanding/intuition about a system. For instance, do any of you know that the Madden-Julian oscillation (in the Indian ocean) determines the severity of winter storms on the East Coast 2 weeks later?

So this course won't be entirely about math and derivations but it will be about conceptual understanding of real systems. In addition, there is a huge amount of data now on weather and climate that we will be immersing ourselves in.

We will also discuss weather forecasting a bit and most of that can be done by using the current 500 mb map as shown below: