ATSC 313 (3) Renewable Energy Meteorology
The meteorology of hydro, wind, and solar power. Atmospheric processes affecting renewable energy on global, regional & local weather scales. [3-0-0]
The course is designed for science, engineering, physical geography, and business students in their 3rd year or beyond. No prior background in weather or renewable energy is needed.
Examples of students who might take this course are:
To increase the ability of engineering students to fit the course into their already tight schedules, we offer this course as a hybrid course (fully online course, except for the in-class final exam).
All the required course material, quizzes, and midterm exams are online (i.e., NO required in-class meetings), except for the final exam.
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 meteorological topics, we have created a set of Learning Goals, labeled a, b, c, d, etc. For example, Learning Goal 9b refers to the second learning goal under topic 9 on Wind Power Forecasting.
Each Learning Goal (and its label such as 9b) 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. For example, should wind-turbine blades be repaired given uncertainty in the forecast, will climate change affect commercial viability of a solar power site, should water be released early from a reservoir in anticipation of forecasted extreme precipitation? 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 Hydro-, Wind-, and Solar-power-weather themes are online open-book 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.