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Project General Information
Topics
The tabled below includes
a list of topics you can choose from. You are certainly welcome to
come up with your own
topic, as long as it has some connection to climate and provides the opportunity
for some analysis and/or original thought.
Send an email to atms211@atmos.washington.edu
by Monday Oct 11 and tell
us your first three choices for topics. Include the number or tell of if it
is your own idea. If the topic has a *, please include the focus you will
take. If necessary, we will give priority to those of you who respond first.
DO
NOT CHOOSE FROM THOSE TYPED IN RED
The instructor and TAs
will then coordinate the topic suggestions among students so no two projects
are alike. We will also try to identify connections among projects so you
can enjoy discussioning your ideas with your colleagues. We will also suggests
groups that might want to work together on posters.
| 1. CLIMATE
OF THE PRESENT |
| 1) Describe the climate of some state or country using data
from the web (* Do not choose France or Saudi Arabia) |
| 2) Describe some aspects of year-to-year
climate variations using data from the web or other sources. (*) |
| 3) Describe
the record high and/or record low temperatures in some region using data from
the web or other sources. (*) |
| 4) Describe climate trends during the 20th century |
| 5) Evaluate the
Gaia hypothesis (read the book by Lovelock) |
| 6) Describe
the economic impacts of El Nino |
| 7) Seasonal
climate forecasting: how is it done? who uses it? |
| 8) Compare
climates of the east coast and west coast at the same latitude |
| 9) How successful
are El Nino predictions? |
| 10) Have hurricanes become more frequent
in the last 50 years? |
11) Compare climates
of the east coast of North America and the west coast of Europe
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12) Investigate archeological
evidence of climate and climate change
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12) What does traditional knowledge tell us about
climate?
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13) How do climate scientists
communicate with the public? How could it be more effective?
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14) Describe the economic
influence of the Indian or Asian monsoon (*)
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15) How is climate data used to manage natural
resources?
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16) Describe the climate conditions associated
with dust storms in Africa or ?
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17) Describe the influence of land use changes
on climate
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| 2. CLIMATE OF THE PAST |
| 1) What role did
climate play in the demise of the Anasazi, Thule, or other civilizations?
(*) |
| 2) How do historical accounts of climate
contribute to our knowledge of climate (e.g., Little Ice Age or Medieval
Warm Period) (*) |
| 3) Describe the climate of the Permian/Triassic
Boundary and the massive extinction |
| 4) Describe the climate dynamics of
the Neoproterozoic Snowball Earth |
| 5) Was
the Little Ice Age global? |
| 6) Was the Younger Dryas global? |
| 7) In what
ways has climate influenced geological development on timescales of tens
to hundreds of millions of years? |
| 8) Investigate the problem of biology
and its survival through the Neoproterozoic Snowball Earth |
| 9) Effect of climate
on the peopling of the New World |
| 10) Effect of the Little Ice Age on
19th century civilization |
| 11) The
American Dust Bowl |
12) Make some simple calculations to show that
it is hard for Mars to ever have had liquid water on its surface, in spite
of the geological evidence
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| 3. CLIMAGE
CHANGE/ CLIMATE OF THE FUTURE |
| 1) What is the expected impact of global
climate change on water resources, ecosystems, coastal zones, human settlements, insurance, or human health? (each of these
is covered in one chapter of the report by the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change IPCC 2001) (*) |
| 2) Discuss the moral and ethical dimensions
of climate change |
| 3) What are the prospects for renewable
energy? You could focus on either natural or technical solution (*) |
| 4) Techno-fixes:
technological solutions for sequestering carbon dioxide |
| 5) Are trends in weather-related insurance
claims related to climate change? |
| 6) Shrinking
tropical glaciers. |
| 7) Effect of
global warming on high latitude climate. |
8) Investigate the issue of uncertainty in climate
prediction, use the IPCC 2001 as a guide. Relate this uncertainty to climate
models
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9) Explain why predicting future cloud distributions
and cloud feedbacks is challenging? Use the IPCC 2001 as a starting point
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10) What are the strengths and weaknesses of
the IPCC 2001? How could the IPCC be better? (Choose either the book on climate
physics or climate impacts) (*)
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11) Explain why climate change is harder to predict
on smaller spatial scales and how this translates into high uncertainty in
climate impacts
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Getting Started
Your textbook has a lot of
relevant information scattered throughout the various chapters, especially
Chapter 8, Chapter 11 and Chapter 12. You can also refer to the links
below, and do your own searches in the literature or on the web. Let us know
if you have any trouble finding relevant references.
Links
Review
article by Thomas Crowley in "Consequences, the nature and implications
of environmental change" (http://www.gcrio.org/CONSEQUENCES/winter96/geoclimate.html)
Another starting point:
NOAA paleoclimatology program
(http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/paleo/)
Ice age climate reconstructions
(http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/nerc.html)
Reference list for
ice age climate (http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/refs.html)
African
Climate and Human Evolution (http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/~peter/Resources/Climate_evol.html)
Cultural
responses to climate change during the late Holocene (http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/~peter/Resources/CultureClimate.html)
Floods, famines, and
emperors : El Niño and the fate of civilizations. Brian Fagan.
Basic Books, New York, 1999.
The Little Ice Age :
How climate made history 1300-1850. Brian Fagan. Basic Books, New York,
2000.
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