[view this page on the Physics and Astronomy web site]

An opportunity exists in the Winter term to take a course in atmospheric physics. Modern atmospheric physics studies the entire Sun-Earth system, starting with the radiation and particles emitted by the Sun and ending with the distribution of that energy into the atmosphere causing weather. We are familiar with weather on the surface, but you may not realize the weather you experience is the result of wave interactions on scales from 10s to 1000s of meters that couple the surface with processes that occur 100s of km in altitude above the surface.

• Atmospheric science is highly interdisciplinary and addresses some extremely important problems that are important to maintaining our current lifestyles. The course will introduce the physical processes necessary to understand problems such as the following:
• anthropogenic (human) effects on climate (e.g. in the recent Paris Climate Change Conference, why a 2 K temperature rise and how robust is this prediction)
• Antarctic (and now Arctic) ozone holes
• El Nino events; the El Nino forecast for this winter will be one of the 3 largest ever observed and will affect weather in Canada
• atmospheric waves
• space weather (space weather is weather associated with the interaction between Earth’s neutral upper atmosphere and the ionized solar wind).