Lecture 8: Soundings + Air Pollution

Part of this lecture is about soundings and the structure of the atmosphere.  I have an activity (further down below) where students plot data from a weather balloon to “discover” the troposphere and stratosphere.  I have several data sets to choose from – all from the same weather balloon but at different resolutions (different amounts of data to plot).  When I do this activity with my students, we have not talked about the structure of the atmosphere at all yet.  After they plot it, then we annotate it and talk about the atmospheric layers.  If you watch the lecture, this data is the same set that I am using on screen.  So in a way the lecture kind of gives away the answer.

I also have some activities that are centered around interpretation of different soundings.  In this lecture I do not emphasize the soundings too much, but in previous classes I did.  So you may or may not be able to answer all of the questions.  This activity forces you to really understand dew point and relative humidity to make sense of what is going on:sounding_examples_II

Key to above assignment:sounding_examples_II_KEY

 

This assignment is shorter, but combines soundings, air pressure maps (from Lecture 7), and air pollution:sounding examples for pollution

Key to above assignment:sounding examples for pollution_KEY

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