Teaching

EAS 2900: Introduction to Programming for Meteorology and Climate Science

Introduction to Python programming and visualization specifically tailored to applications in meteorology and climate science. Topics include: basic Python programming, data manipulation, and instruction in the use of scientific analysis and visualization packages such as numpy, pandas, xarray, cartopy, and metpy.

Below is a figure created in Python that plots daily mean, maximum and minimum temperature from Cornell’s famous Game Farm Road weather station relative to the most recent 30-year climatology (think “expected temperatures”). The black line at the end shows forecasts from the National Weather Service (NWS) over the next few days.

ithaca_temperature_annual_cycle_fcst_subplots

 

EAS 2680: Climate and Global Warming

Familiarizes students from a range of disciplines with such contemporary issues in climatology as global warming and El Niño. Introduces the natural greenhouse effect, past climates, and observed and projected climate changes and impacts. Also covers natural climate variations (e.g., El Niño) and their consequences and predictability. Readings focus on recent scientific findings related to climate change.

Below is an animation created in Python showing 12-month running average global temperature from observations and different realizations from a climate model (the CESM1 Large Ensemble). The maps on the right give the corresponding spatial pattern of temperature anomaly, all relative to the average temperature of 1920-1949.

Take away: we observed *one* realization of the historical climate, but thanks to the chaotic nature of the climate system, other equally-likely realizations would have been possible. Such realizations can be generated and investigated with climate models and are critical for detecting and attributing current climate change – for example, both observations and the model react to increasing greenhouse gas concentrations over the last 100 years, but also show synchronized cooling in response to strong volcanic eruptions, the aerosols of which block incoming solar radiation for a few years.

Cornell Atkinson Climate Change Seminar

Guest speaker in spring 2023.