Geosciences 232

Climate Dynamics of the Earth and Other Planets

PlanetaryClimateBook        Problem and Reading Assignments         News Archive         Recordings of 2011 Lectures      2012 Recordings


Fall Quarter 2013

Mondays and Wednesdays 1:30-2:50, Hinds 561

Current News and Announcements

2013 take home final exam is posted here. Download and return answers to David Taylor within 48 hours.

The recording of the Wed. 27 November Greenhouse Effect lecture is here

The recording of the Tuesday, 26 Nov. Snowball Earth lecture is here.

Video of my Astrobiology Institute lecture from Monday is available here          The recording of the Thursday, Oct 17 make-up lecture can be viewed here


 

 

Course Information


Assignments

Recordings of selected 2012 lectures

Recordings of Lectures


Course Evaluations: Course evaluations are now done electronically, not on paper. Please take the time to fill out a course evaluation here . At the end of the quarter, please login to your cMore account, go to your course schedule, and click on the evaluation prompt. I appreciate the time you put into filling out these evaluations. If you liked the course, they help me attract more students. If there are aspects that didn't work for you, I want to know about them so I can figure out how to improve things

Syllabus

There are 20 lectures. The following is a target for what we hope to cover, but the flight plan is likely to change once the wheels are off the ground.

Lecture 1: What the course is about. Organizational housekeeping. Introduction to Python

Lab sessions 1,2 : Introduction to the Python programming language.

Lectures 2-3: (Chapter 1.1 - 1.6) Planetary energy balance and temperature. Earth history in deep time, with emphasis on the questions we will address in this course. Earth/Mars/Venus and habitable zones. Extrasolar planets.

Lectures 4: (Chapter 1.1 - 1.6) Stable isotope proxies, and survey of Cenozoic climate variations

Lecture 5: Observations of atmospheric structure. Basics of dry atmospheric thermodynamics. Pressure, temperature, density and ideal gas law. Partial pressures and atmospheric composition. Lots of in-class illustrations, many showing how to use Python as a calculator.

Lecture 6: Dry entropy and potential temperature.

Lecture 7: Hydrostatics

Lecture 8: Phase change. Latent heat. Clausius-Clapeyron

Lectures 9,10: The moist adiabat, including an introduction to numerical solution of ordinary differential equations. Application to Earth,Titan and Early Mars

Lecture 11: Electromagnetic radiation basics. Planck's constant and quantization. Working with spectra.

Lecture 12: Blackbody radiation. The Planck function.

Lecture 13: Basic planetary energy balance for planets with an infrared-transparent atmosphere

Lectures 14: How the greenhouse effect works. Concept of the "radiating level" and how it affects surface temperature. A survey of spectra of CO2 and H2O absorption, and the corresponding spectra of outgoing infrared radiation

Lectures 15: Ice-albedo feedback and Snowball Earth

Lecture 16: Partially absorbing atmospheres. Emissivity and Kirchoff's Law

Lecture 17: Radiative equilibrium for optically thin atmospheres. Skin temperature. Basic theory of the stratosphere. Effect of solar absorption on stratospheric temperature

Lectures 18: Water vapor feedback. Presentation of numerical simulations of outgoing infrared radiation vs. T for an atmosphere with CO2 and water vapor.

Lectures 19-20: Introduction to real-gas radiative transfer. Logarithmic behavior of radiative forcing. Calculations involving polynomial fits of OLR to real-gas radiation codes. (Global warming, PETM, Faint Young Sun)

Course Evaluations: Please take the time to fill out a course evaluation here . Login to your cMore account, go to your course schedule, and click on the evaluation prompt. I appreciate the time you put into filling out these evaluations. If you liked the course, they help me attract more students. If there are aspects that didn't work for you, I want to know about them so I can figure out how to improve things. One thing I will definitely do differently next year is to set aside the entire first week as a Python clinic, with a required lab session; the object will be that everybody is up and running with the language installation by the end of the week. This year, there was also a problem finding a time for the weekly problem/lab session that would fit into people's schedule. I am thinking of scheduling an official lab/section meeting as part of the course, though I am a bit afraid that if I add a required scheduled session it will increase the chance of conflict with other courses and inhibit people from enrolling. Suggestions as to how to handle this are welcome.


2012 Assignments

 

2011 Assignments

 

Old Material: