Course Description

Rationale

Meteorology has long served as a key subject to arouse students’ interest in science, mathematics, and technology.  This course will focus on the science behind one attention-grabbing aspect  – weather forecasting and extreme weather events.

Measurable Learning Outcomes

Upon successful completion of this course, the student will be able to:

1. Identify the atmosphere’s physical and chemical principles and visualize how they interact to drive the Earth’s weather.
2. Describe the diverse observing systems used by meteorologists, the measurements they acquire, their limitations, and strengths in analyzing and forecasting.
3. Interpret surface weather maps, upper air charts, vertical profiles, and time series to discern atmospheric structure and produce a short-range forecast. Describe and discuss issues in atmospheric sciences and weather forecasting.
4. Compare and contrast the scale, motions, and thermal structure of winter storms, hurricanes, and tornadoes. Discuss the methods and challenges of forecasting each.
5. Plan how to prepare and recover from a wide variety of extreme weather hazards and assess the need to take proper actions against future threats.

Course Assignment

After reading the Course Syllabus and Student Expectations, the student will complete the related checklist found in the Course Overview at Liberty University.

Discussions are collaborative learning experiences and involve answering open-ended questions on multi-faceted topics. The student is required to create a thread in response to the provided prompt for each discussion. Each thread must be at least 350 words and demonstrate course-related knowledge. In addition to the thread, the student is required to reply to 1 other classmate’s thread. The reply must be at least 100 words and add substantially to the conversation. All posts must adhere to the current APA format.

Each quiz will cover the Learn material for the assigned module. Each quiz will be open-book/open-notes, containing 25 multiple-choice and true/false questions. Quizzes have a 1-hour time limit.

The student will choose an extreme weather event based on the criteria provided. They will show how it meets the criteria and produce a bibliographic reference list of at least four sources, two of which are scholarly discussing the meteorology of the event plus at least one substantive news article which discusses the impact or recovery.

Based on the case selected above, students will research the meteorology behind the event drawing ties to knowledge gained from this course.  They will examine the impact and recovery efforts looking for factors that are uniquely pertinent to the type of storm.  The application will be to provide insights for future Liberty disaster relief efforts. The 1,000 – 1,500 word paper will be based on the references collected in the identification exercise and following APA formatting.

Modern meteorology is graphically-rich with many different types of maps, images, photos, and plots.  These exercises ask you to interpret graphics patterned after the ones shown in your text.