Introduction to Atmospheric Science course

Since the Fall Semester 2002, the Department of Physics at Prairie View A&M University has been offering  a course on weather and climate, currently called “Introduction to Atmospheric Science”. The course utilized material from the education component of the American Meteorological Society, who developed a course entitled “Online Weather Studies” (now simply titled “Weather Studies”). We continue to offer the course from time to time, depending on student demand and interest. We have used the course materials from the American Meteorological Society successfully as a standalone course, in the laboratory setting, and as components of existing courses.

Check with the Physics Department for when the course,  Introduction to Atmospheric Science, PHSC 3322, might be offered next.

Information about Weather Studies can be found at this website. There are also links to the two other courses they offer material for, Ocean Studies and Climate Studies.

Our offering of this course promotes the success of the AMS Online Weather Studies diversity project, which is intended to encourage more minority students to get involved in the sciences by providing access to courses such as Online Weather Studies.

The course is dynamic and flexible, able to be taught entirely within a traditional classroom setting, or entirely online as a distance learning experience, depending on the situation. Currently the course is taught face-to-face and includes a small laboratory component. The purpose of the course is to equip the student with the knowledge and skills to not only understand and interpret the weather as reported from various sources such as the evening news, the internet, or elsewhere, but also to provide the student with a toolkit of critical thinking skills whose usefulness will go beyond this class. These skills should prove helpful in other classes as well as in everyday life. The critical thinking exercises are couched in the weekly weather topics, and give these topics an added dimension of usefulness. In many cases, the application is made to diversity in culture and society in general and to worldviews not necessarily of the student’s own.