ATSC 113    Applied Meteorology
Weather for Sailing, Flying & Snow Sports



Course Info

UBC Calendar Entry

ATSC 113 (3) Applied Meteorology
Atmospheric-science principles elucidated by case studies applied to snow sports, sailing, surfing, soaring, and flying. [3-0-0]

Intended Audience

The course is open to all students of any year and any major.  No prerequisites.  This counts as a 3-credit science course.  You do not need any prior background or experience in sailing, flying or snow sports. 

If you already have expertise in some of these areas, we offer links to advanced info.  But this extra info is not required for this course - - you can still earn full marks without it.

Meeting Times and Places

All the required course material, quizzes, and midterm exams are online (i.e., NO required in-class meetings), except for the final exam.  The final exam is taken in-person, on-campus in a UBC classroom.

Syllabus Overview

Theme: Orientation 

Theme
: Flying Weather 
  Topics:
1. Clouds, Ceiling, Visibility & Fog
2. Pressure, Temperature, Winds & Wind Shear
3. Turbulence & Icing
4. Thunderstorms & Aviation Weather Services

Theme: Snow-Sports Weather 
  Topics:
5. Winter Weather
6. Winter Mountain Weather
7. Snow Conditions

Theme: Sailing Weather 
  Topics:
8. Winds and Waves
9. Large-Scale Winds
10. Local Wind and Tide Effects
11. Marine Weather Services

Theme Applied Weather 
  Topics:
12. Synthesis of Weather Concepts
13. Create your own ePortfolio of weather concepts

Textbooks and Required Resources

How to Access the Online Content

We have created a strong relationship between the online content (Meteorological Concepts) and the Learning Goals.  You will be most successful in this course if you understand this relationship.  It works as follows.

For each of the 12 meteorological topics listed above, we have created a set of Learning Goals, labeled a, b, c, d, etc.  For example, Learning Goal 5b refers to the second learning goal under topic 5 on Winter Weather. 

Each Learning Goal (and its label such as 5b) is listed near the top of its own web page, and the Meteorological Concepts that you can study to achieve that Learning Goal are presented underneath it, on the same web page.  To help give you better understanding of the nature and context of the meteorological concepts, we cover more info than required for you to achieve the Learning Goal.  However, the quiz and exam questions are based only on the portion of the content specifically described by the Learning Goals.  This allows you to focus your studies on the most important material.

To make the course more interesting, we have designed case-study Modules around specific weather related events, such as aircraft accidents, skiing situations, and sailing voyages.  As you work through each case-study Module, we provide links to the relevant Learning Goals and their associated Meteorological Concepts, and also provide links to short online quizzes to help you check and improve your understanding of the material.  Each case-study touches only a subset of the Learning Goals.  Initially, you access the Learning Goals this way - - via links from the case-study Modules.  The Schedule web page tells you which modules to work on each week.  You will find the online Modules on the UBC Canvas website for this course.  

At the ends of the flying-weather and snow-sports-weather themes are online midterm exams.  To make your exam review more efficient, we have organized and consolidated all the Learning Goals into tables that you can access from the "Learning Goals" or "Course Goals" links from the course home page. These tables are useful when you review prior to the exams.  The quizzes and exams cover only the meteorological concepts, and not the case-study details that were used to motivate study of the meteorology.

In summary, there are three ways to get to the Learning Goals and their associated Meteorological Concepts: 1) via Modules on UBC Canvas; 2) via links from the Course Goals web page; and 3) via the Learning Goals web page.

One last note:  When we instructors refer to any specific Learning Goal (such as learning goal 5b), we are actually referring to both the Learning Goal -AND- its associated Meteorological Concepts.



UBC ATSC 113 Weather for Sailing, Flying & Snow Sports
Copyright © 2015-2022 by Roland Stull
Last modification: 27 July 2022
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