EAE2111: Introduction to Climate Science

16% Practical reports
There were 5 practicals run throughout the semester. Pracs 1, 3 and 4 were run over two weeks, and pracs 2 and 5 were run over one week. Each week was worth 2% of the total grade. The pracs usually involved using excel or a website to analyse climate data or look at future climate possibilities. Only prac 5 had compulsory attendance and the others only had recommended attendance, however around half the class tended to turn up anyway to get assistance with questions. The pracs are handed in by completing a quiz online where you enter in your answers to the questions.

10% Practical field report
One Saturday towards the start of the semester was the 'Climate Science Field Day', where we went out to the baseball field and used equipment to measure/note down the state of the atmosphere (eg. wind speed/direction, temperature, humidity). It was raining quite heavily on the day we were supposed to have the field day, so unfortunately we only got through 1.5 rotations of the equipment before we had to stop and cancel the rest of the day. Then, the next two practical sessions and your own time is spend on using the data collected to answer questions about the state of the atmosphere at that time. 4% of the grade is made up of your attendance on the day and 6% is for the report itself, which I thought was a pretty good deal.

20% Major assignment (essay)
This is a 2000 word essay, written about one of four topic choices. It was explained that this essay was strictly about climate science, hence no discussion about the impacts/effects of the topic were necessary. The four choices we had related to land-surface interactions and drought, how the land surface can influence local circulations, the Southern Annular Mode, and causes of the Millennium drought. I chose the last topic and enjoyed learning about the possible causes, however there were a lot of journal articles to read, which took a long time.

4% Topic quizzes
The unit was broken up into four topics. After the end of each topic, an online quiz was available, made up of 25 multiple-choice questions to answer about the lecture content. Each quiz was only worth 1%, and it was emphasised that very little time should be spent on these quizzes, and that they were instead a good way for Shayne to work out which areas he should include in the revision lecture. Almost all the answers were directly from the lecture notes.

50% Exam
A two-hour exam with no calculator or notes. There were three sections in the exam. In section A, you had to answer 8 of 13 short-answer questions. In section B, you had to answer 1 of 4 long-answer questions, based on topics 1 and 2. Section C was the same, based on topics 3 and 4. In general, I found the exam to be quite accessible, as there was quite a bit of choice in what you could choose to write about.

Overall, I found this unit to be quite enjoyable. The unit was divided up into four topics:
1. Energy in the climate system (simple climate models, surface energy budget, energy in the climate system)
2. General circulation of the climate system (wind, oceans, climate zones)
3. Climate variability and modelling (climate modes, aerosols, palaeoclimatology)
4. Climate change detection and attribution (projections, modelling of climate change, response to climate change)

Each topic ran for about 2-3 weeks each. Lectures were mostly pretty interesting but had heaps of content. Given that there were 3 hours of lectures each week, there was a lot of content taught in this unit, meaning that revising for the exam was difficult at times. Computer labs were also pretty fun.

An interesting part of this unit were the bonus questions. At the start of each week, Shayne would put up a bonus question about something related to climate science that we'd be learning about that week in lectures. It was a chance to do a bit of research before learning the content. The best answers to the bonus question posted on the forum would get a bonus 3, 2 or 1 marks added on to their final result of the unit. Some easier questions were quite heavily contested and had 7-8 people answering.
So in summary, this unit was pretty good with a moderate workload and interesting content.

Dr. Shayne McGregor

No past exams available.

4 out of 5

Yes, with screen capture

The 'recommended' textbook is Weather and Climate of Australia and New Zealand, 1ed or 2ed by Sturman and Tapper. For each lecture, specific pages in the textbook were identified to read, and some weeks included an online link to an article related to the week's content. I did not buy/use that textbook at all and found that the lecture content was sufficient.

3x1hr lectures, 1x2hr practical/computer lab

2018, Semester 1