Teaching and Outreach
MIT-WHOI Joint Program Courses
12.860 Climate Variability and Diagnostics (Co-Instructor Fall 2024)
Description: Explores climate variability and change, focusing on the atmosphere and ocean, while building experience applying diagnostic analyses to a range of modern observations and models. Provides practical insight, from regional to global scale, with applications to past and future climates. Emphasizes salient features of the mean climate system and modes of natural variability, as well as observed and projected manifestations of anthropogenic climate change. Students gain experience accessing, analyzing, and visualizing a wide range of gridded observational-based datasets, as well as output from global climate model simulations. Develops the tools necessary to apply climate diagnostic analysis to one's own research, as well as the interdisciplinary edge to critically assess and interpret the observational and model results underpinning the Fifth Assessment Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
12.800 Fluid Dynamics of the Atmosphere and Ocean (Co-Instructor Fall 2024)
Description: Introduction to fluid dynamics. Students acquire an understanding of some of the basic concepts of fluid dynamics that are needed as a foundation for advanced coursework in atmospheric science, physical oceanography, ocean engineering, climate science, etc. Emphasizes fluid fundamentals, with an atmosphere/ocean twist. Students taking graduate version complete additional assignments.
12.757 Climate Change Science: Extreme Events in a Warming World (Guest Lecturer Fall 2023)
Description: This seminar course introduces the physical science of climate change and its relationship to extreme events. Students will be given a broad overview of integral components of the climate system—the hydrological cycle; energy balance; ocean circulation and climate; atmospheric circulation and clouds; and cryosphere and sea level—with a particular focus on their relationships to extreme events including heatwaves, cold spells, extreme precipitation, floods, droughts, and storms. We will also cover the carbon cycle and provide a perspective on some important extreme climate events throughout Earth’s history.
12.870 Air-Sea Interaction: Boundary Layers (Guest Lecturer Spring 2023)
Description: Addresses the interaction of the atmosphere and ocean on temporal scales from seconds to days and spatial scales from centimeters to kilometers. Topics include the generation, propagation, and decay of surface waves; the processes by which mass, heat, momentum, and energy are transported vertically within the coupled atmospheric and oceanic boundary layers and across the air-sea interface; and the statistical tools, mathematical models, and observational methods that are used to quantify these processes.
Iowa State University Courses
MTEOR 443: Dynamic Meteorology I
Description: Conservation laws, governing equations, circulation and vorticity. Development of quasi-geostrophic theory.
Student Learning Goals and Objectives: This course is the first of a two-part series on the fluid dynamics of the atmosphere. The class begins with first principles based on conservation of mass, angular momentum, and energy and it ends with circulation and vorticity. The overall goal is to understand two key aspects to fluid motions on Earth, rotation and density stratification.
MTEOR 440/540: Tropical Meteorology
Description: Weather and climate of the tropical atmosphere. Topics covered include easterly waves, tropical cyclogenesis (i.e., hurricanes, typhoons, cyclones), equatorial waves, El Niño-Southern oscillation, Madden-Julian oscillation, and monsoons.
Student Learning Goals and Objectives: This course is an introduction to tropical meteorology, with approximately half of the course focused on tropical cyclones (hurricanes, typhoons, cyclones) and the other half focused on large-scale circulations such as the Madden-Julian oscillation, El Niño-Southern Oscillation, monsoons, and equatorial waves. There are bi-weekly homework assignments, weekly forecast discussions, a midterm exam, and a final group presentation. The course material will provide a strong foundation from which students can build to carry on with them in many areas of environmental sciences.
MTEOR 543: Advanced Dynamic Meteorology I
Description: The first half of a two semester sequence. Governing equations, scale analysis, simple types of wave motion in the atmosphere, instability theory.
Student Learning Goals and Objectives: A graduate-level course covering large-scale fluid motions of Earth’s atmosphere and ocean.
Science Education and Public Outreach
We devise rotating fluid tank experiments motivated by the UCLA DIYnamics project and we use other instruments to help with in-class education, public outreach, and for other activities. See our Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab page for more info. Also, see one of our DIYnamics blog posts.