DEVELOPING AN UNDERGRADUATE LABORATORY IN ATMOSPHERIC PHYSICS

Meteorological measurements and instrumentation must be part of the undergraduate education of the next generation of atmospheric scientists. These future meteorologists will be using observations from an increasingly sophisticated array of instruments and they must understand what the numbers mean. The Department of Meteorology at The Pennsylvania State University has recognized this need and has developed a required two-semester undergraduate physical meteorology sequence that couples measurements, instruments, and laboratory experiments to lecture courses in atmospheric physics. These courses help students apply concepts learned in quantitative analysis, statistics, and calculus to laboratory experiments and atmospheric observations. They also demonstrate the basic operation of several common meteorological instruments and under which conditions these measurements have meaning.