The Atmospheric Science Certificate provides a rigorous foundation in the workings of the atmosphere allowing students to study variability in and understand changes in the modern atmosphere. The curriculum of this program will provide an understanding of atmospheric processes, both past and present, and their impacts on natural ecosystems and society through studies in climate and weather variability and biosphere-atmosphere interactions.

This is an embedded undergraduate certificate open to any major.

For more information, please see the Academic Catalog.

Major Required

An introduction to weather and climate including influences on the biosphere (ecosystems and biomes). This course looks at local, regional, and global geographic relationships among atmospheric and biospheric systems, including an introduction to climate change.

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An introduction to weather and climate including influences on the biosphere (ecosystems and biomes). This course looks at local, regional, and global geographic relationships among atmospheric and biospheric, including an introduction to climate change. Students will engage in hands-on, field-based environmental observations in the laboratory.

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This course provides an introduction to the fundamentals of climatology with an emphasis on how the climate system works, quantitative approaches to climate analysis, the planetary energy budget, and air-sea interactions. Urban, regional and global climate features and human impacts are addressed. Current issues in climate research, sustainability, and policy will also be explored.

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Major Selects

Select 2 Courses.

GEOG-3563 and GEOG-4564 are focused on techniques, and only 1 of these may be counted as an option.

This course introduces the principles of remote sensing and explores the practical integration of remote sensing with geographic information systems.

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A study of weather and climate, including atmospheric properties and processes, and atmospheric influences on Earth's surface environment, at a variety of spatial and time-scales.

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Biogeography is the subdiscipline of Geography that deals with the distribution, ranges, and limits of plants and animals over space and time. This class will focus on the processes and patterns of plant distribution in the contemporary landscape, stressing the development of North American vegetation. The course will cover topics evolution as it relates to Quaternary migration and distribution, North American biomes, disturbance ecology, invasive species, environmental stewardship, climate change, and field methods.

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Ecology and Climatology are two vastly different disciplines. Ecology is concerned with the interactions of organisms with their environments and Climatology is the study of the long-term physical state of the atmosphere. There two disciplines were not combined until the advent of global climate models in the 1970s. Ecological climatology is the interdisciplinary framework used to understand the functioning of the terrestrial ecosystems as part of the climate system. Specifically, how do changes in land cover influence short-term and long-term weather patterns.

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This course applies remote sensing techniques to contemporary topics like image classification, LiDAR, natural resources, urbanization, water, or climate. Students will learn how to process remote sensing data and will develop remote sensing application projects.

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This is an advanced course on the evidence for, and theories of, environmental variability over time. Students will become familiar with environmental change before and since the Industrial Revolution. Attention will be paid to natural environmental mechanisms and the human activities

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Dendrochronology is one of the most versatile disciplines in the physical and cultural sciences. The science uses tree rings that are dated to their exact year of formation to analyze the temporal and spatial patterns of processes in the physical and cultural sciences. The science takes advantage of the fact that trees are nature's ultimate environmental monitoring stations. They are immobile, they assimilate events in the environment, they have their own special language, and they can't lie (although sometimes they make searching for the truth quite challenging). In this course, you'll learn how to read the language of trees and how to use this information to learn about past and present environmental processes that may shed light on your particular research questions.

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Specific dates for Admissions (Undergraduate only), Financial Aid, Fee Payments, Registration, Start/End of term, Final Exams, etc. are available in THE SCOOP.