'WEATHER IN A TANK': Exploiting Laboratory Experiments in the Teaching of Meteoroiogy, Ocanography, and Climate

摘要

According to the American Meteorological Society (AMS), roughly 85 universities offer undergraduate degrees in meteorology and/or oceanography in the United States, and the undergraduate meteorology population is rapidly expanding (see Knox 2008). Laboratory fluid experiments, however, play a minor role in the education of these students. This is in the context of a field of research that is increasingly dominated by large coordinated programs to gather observations, present and manipulate those observations using Web resources, and attempt to simulate them on the computer. We argue here that an educational experience that focuses on fundamentals, and involves the study of idealized abstractions in the context of real-world data, would greatly aid our students' Understanding and intuition about the dynamics of a fluid on a rotating, differentially heated sphere and how that dynamics helps to shape the climate of the Earth.