GEOS 309
Modern Climate Fall 2020
Division III Quantative/Formal Reasoning
Cross-listed ENVI 209 / GEOS 309 / ENVI 209 / GEOS 309
This is not the current course catalog

What will happen to the Earth’s climate in the next century? What is contributing to sea level rise? Is Arctic sea ice doomed? In this course we will study the components of the climate system (atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere, biosphere and land surface) and the processes through which they interact. Greenhouse gas emission scenarios will form the basis for investigating how these systems might respond to human activity. This course will explore how heat and mass are moved around the atmosphere and ocean to demonstrate how the geographic patterns of climate change arise. We will also focus on climate feedback effects–like the albedo feedback associated with sea ice and glacier loss–and how these processes can accelerate climate change. In labs we will learn MATLAB to use process and full-scale climate models to investigate the behavior of these systems in response to increasing greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. This course is in the Oceans and Climate group for the Geosciences major.