A world of weather fundamentals of meteorology 4th edition

I teach quite a few courses in the Department, so we may see each other many times along your journey to completing your degree! Specifically, I have taught our synoptic, mesoscale, and radar meteorology courses along with our forecasting cirriculum.

I've also taught our Principles of Atmospheric Measurements Meteo W course where a lot of what we learn in gets applied to measure atmospheric variables. I look forward to our time together on this learning journey! The atmosphere creates and sustains life. It's amazing and it's important to know how it works. I love teaching this course because it contains all the essential elements of the science behind the weather.

I have been fascinated by the weather ever since I was a little kid, sitting on the curb in front of my house in Houston, Texas, watching the huge thunderstorms build and build and build until you knew the rain was coming soon and heavy. Usually I got inside before I got soaked, but not always! As a physics graduate student, I tried to focus on Astrophysics, but I knew I loved studying the atmosphere the most because it is so unpredictable and so relevant to our lives, so as soon as I could, I returned to studying and teaching about the atmosphere here at Penn State.

I have taught Meteo in residence four times, three in the past five years. My research specialty is atmospheric chemistry, but to understand the chemistry, you need to understand the atmosphere and all of its physics. I've been at Penn State 27 years and have had a research group this whole time. It consists of graduate students, research associates who have Ph. We have participated in more than 40 field studies of the atmosphere using both towers on the ground and airplanes.

We have studied the atmosphere in places as far north as northern Sweden and as far south as New Zealand, and many places in between.

In , we were part of the Deep Convective Clouds and Chemistry study and spent our time flying around thunderstorms in the central United States. If you cannot attend class for a variety of reasons, please reach out to your colleagues in class this is a great way to meet new people and create successful study groups!! In addition, if you are feeling ill, please stay home and take care of yourself! One source of extra credit is the highly recommended semester project.

This project is designed to raise your level of consciousness regarding the environment in which we live. You will write a meteorological diary how does the weather affect you? Carry it with you, especially when you go outdoors and make at least three entries per week, but each day can count for no more than one entry. Keep each entry relatively short, maybe filling one side of a 3-by-5 page, unless you just can't help yourself.

Entries might cover interesting weather conditions of the day, a special meteorological phenomenon or "oddity," a weather reference from another course or a stapled-in copy of a weather cartoon or news report from that day about significant weather or a weather-related tragedy with your personal comments. Let it be personal, original and creative. Simply, for example, stapling in the daily forecast or reporting the temperature will not earn you any credit.

There is a deduction for less than 50 entries and no additional credit for more than 50 entries, so plan on 50 good ones! Another source of extra credit will be a weather forecasting contest later in the semester, which will be announced in October or early November. Students in this class are expected to write up their problem sets individually and to work the exams on their own. Class members may work on the problem sets in groups, but then each student must write up the answers separately.

Students are not to copy problem or exam answers from another person's paper and present them as their own; students may not plagiarize text from papers or websites written by others. Students who present other people's work as their own will receive at least a 0 on the assignment and may well receive an F or XF in the course. All course materials students receive or to which students have online access are protected by copyright laws. For example, uploading completed labs, homework, or other assignments to any study site constitutes a violation of this policy.

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Degrees Fahrenheit, developed in the early 's by G. Daniel Fahrenheit , are used to record surface temperature measurements by meteorologists in the United States. However, since most of the rest of the world uses degrees Celsius developed in the 18th Century and upper air observations are recorded in Celsius, it is important to be able to convert from units of degrees Fahrenheit to degrees Celsius and backwards.

The only time you will probably use Kelvin is in scientific formulas. Humidity is the amount of water vapor in the air. If the air is very "sticky", then there is a high humidity, while if the air is dry, then there is a low humidity. A good measure of how much water vapor is in the air is the dew point temperature. As air is cooled, it becomes more dense allowing it to "hold" less moisture.

Eventually, the temperature could drop to a point in which no more water can be held in the air and therefore must condense or "fall" out of the air. At this point, the air is considered saturated. The dew point temperature is a measure of the temperature at which water would condense out of the air if it were cooled. The dew point temperature can then be compared to the air temperature to get the relative humidity.

When the air temperature and the dew point temperature are close together, the relative humidity is higher, than if the two temperatures were farther apart.

Atmospheric pressure is defined as the force per unit area exerted against a surface by the weight of the air above that surface.

In the diagram below, the pressure at point "X" increases as the weight of the air above it increases. The same can be said about decreasing pressure, where the pressure at point "X" decreases if the weight of the air above it also decreases. Thinking in terms of air molecules, if the number of air molecules above a surface increases, there are more molecules to exert a force on that surface and consequently, the pressure increases. The opposite is also true, where a reduction in the number of air molecules above a surface will result in a decrease in pressure.

Atmospheric pressure is measured with an instrument called a "barometer", which is why atmospheric pressure is also referred to as barometric pressure. The barometer was invented in and marked the beginning of true scientific study of the weather.

In aviation and television weather reports, pressure is given in inches of mercury "Hg , while meteorologists use millibars mb , the unit of pressure found on weather maps. Most scientific formulas that you will work with in the near future will use Pascals; therefore, it is important to be able to convert the pressure into many different units of measure.