Extreme Weather and Climate

3 credits · Undergraduate

This course provides a fundamental understanding of the extreme weather and climate variability that have affected Earth in recent decades. We begin with an overview of fire weather and hurricanes, using these phenomena to explore general principles that are also relevant to drought, tornadoes, and other extreme weather. Then we examine how atmospheric composition, planetary orbits, and radiation control global climate, and how all of these influence extreme weather. Additional topics include prediction of complex systems, chaos theory, feedbacks, instability, atmospheric aerosols, and air pollution. We use the atmospheres of other planets for comparison, learning more about Earth by seeing just how different planetary climate can be.