Field Assignment: Atmosphere

Field Assignment: The Atmosphere

The objective:

This assignment is to encourage you to look carefully at the atmosphere and connect what you see to the general principles of meteorology described in your textbook.

Procedure:

Take two pictures of the atmosphere on two different days.  For each one record the time and date, location, and the direction you took the photo. 

Look up weather information for that day on the Internet.  Make notes about general atmospheric conditions and in particular note the location of high and low-pressure systems and fronts.

Report Format:

The cover page should include the title of the assignment, your name, the date, the class.

The body of the text should be one-two pages long.  Mount each photo directly in the report, with a caption listing all of the details about when and where you took the picture.  Now write one to two paragraphs interpreting what you see in the picture.  If there are clouds, what kind of clouds are they, and what do they mean?  Is there evidence of air pollution or unusual wind activity?  If the air is clear, why is it clear?  Use the information you got from the Internet and from reading your textbook to support your interpretations (cite the references in parentheses directly in the text where you use the information).  Conclude by briefly describing what these weather conditions indicate for future weather 6-12 hours after the photo was taken (in other words, what is there in the picture that can be used to help make a weather forecast?).

The last page is for references (you won't need the whole page for those, but make sure you record both the title and the URL of any web page you use for the assignment, as well as author, date, title and publisher for any book references).