The goal of this advanced course in climatology is to equip graduate students in the earth, atmosphere, hydrologic and environmental sciences with a comprehensive understanding of how global and regional weather patterns and atmospheric circulation processes interact to produce unique and varying climates worldwide. This course builds on presumed background knowledge of "the climate system" by applying a synoptic meteorological and climatological approach to analyze and explicate the complexity of climatic patterns and processes from continent to continent across the globe. |  |
 | The organizing framework for the course is an emphasis on the interactions between global atmospheric processes and regional climatic responses as they are manifested in synoptic-scale features and processes in different parts of the world. In addition to a general overview of global atmospheric processes and regional climatic patterns, the course will address the earth's "problem climates" 1and climatically sensitive zones that are most susceptible to floods, droughts, and other climatic extremes. |
| Online data resources will provide the basis for an up-to-date technical analysis of regional weather and climate patterns. Using Interactive Plotting and Analysis Pages, the NCEP Reanalysis Electronic Atlas, and other gridded datasets we will create visualizations of climate variables and synoptic circulation patterns in order to probe and deconstruct classic "textbook" explanations of global and regional climate from a process-based perspective. |  |
 | Graduate students in geography, hydrology, geosciences, atmospheric sciences, global change, natural resources, environmental sciences, arid lands and other related areas are welcome — especially if your research involves the study of past, present or future climatic variability in locations throughout the world. The prerequisite is an upper division climatology or meteorology course (GEOG 530 or equivalent). Contact the instructor to inquire about other suitable prerequisites. |
COURSE OBJECTIVES: (1) to provide an in-depth treatment of the causes of regional weather and climatic patterns and processes in terms of synoptic atmospheric circulation patterns. (2) to examine and analyze regional examples of processes driven by the energy and moisture fluxes at the global scale (3) to provide the climatic basis for a critical evaluation of some of the most urgent regional climate‑related extreme-events facing us today; especially floods and droughts (4) to provide a sound climate-based foundation for the analysis of climatic environments of the past and/or future and a physical basis for the interpretation of climates in different parts of the world using indices, modeling and/or paleoenvironmental techniques |  |