Department of Integrated
Climate System Science

A seminar course designed to treat emerging or topical subjects in Climate System – the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere, lithosphere, and biosphere. It Involves lectures, reading from the literature,and student participation in discussion. Topics vary from year to year.

Special course offerings by staff and visiting scientists on important topics in climate system sciences.

Special course offerings by staff and visiting scientists on important topics in climate system sciences.

Introduction to environmental perils and their impact on everyday life. Geological and meteorological processes including earthquakes, volcanic activity, large storms, global climate change,mass extinctions throughout Earth’s history, and human activity that causes andprevents natural disasters.

The equations of motions for rotating stratified flow and their application to the atmospheric and oceanic dynamics; Ekman layer dynamics, potential vorticity dynamics, the quasigeostrophic approximation, theories of the wind-driven oceanic circulation, theories of the atmospheric Hadley circulation, geostrophic adjustment, and baroclinic instability.

The class discusses ocean-atmospherein teraction dynamics that cause climate to vary in space and time, and form the physical basis for predicting year-to-year climate variability and projecting future climate change in the face of global warming.

Review of exact methods for ordinary differential equations. Expansions about regular and irregular singular points. Introduction to asymptotic expansions. Approximate methods for non linear differential equations. Regular and singular perturbation theory. Additional topics depending upon the interests of the instructor. WKB, method of multiple scales, boundary layer theory.

Introduction to geological archives; the tools for paleoclimate reconstruction and a sampling of important issues from the geological record, including the development of “greenhouse” and “icehouse” worlds, the origin and evaluation of glacial cycles, and the origin of“millennial scale” climate variability.

Probability and statistics and their application to make inferences from geophysical data: point processes, distributions, maximum likelihood estimation, hypothesis testing and confidence intervals, least squares, density estimation, interpolation and smoothing. Analysis of geophysical measurements, especially time series, Fourier theory digital signal processing, and spectral analysis.

This course reviews the physical principles of monsoon climate variation in various time scales ranging from intra seasonal to tectonic time scales. Key dynamic and thermodynamic processes for monsoon meteorology will be discussed.

Physical description of the sea; physical properties of seawater, methods and measurements, boundary processes, regional oceanography.

Satellite remote sensing provides global observations of Earth to monitor environmental changes in land, oceans, andice. Overview physical principles of remote sensing, including orbits,electromagnetic radiation, diffraction, electro-optical, and microwave systems

Dynamics of currents and waves in the ocean, including the effects of stratification, rotation, topography, wind, and nonlinearity. Propagation and dynamics of currents and waves in the ocean, including the effects of stratification, rotation, topography, wind, and nonlinearity.