 |
WEATHER MAN: Jacobson has taught
the class 13 times. |
Linda A. Cicero |
Sophomore Mary Alfred checked
out Civil and Environmental Engineering 63: Weather and
Storms last year, but couldn’t fit it
into her schedule. On the first day of class this fall,
she returned—sitting forward in her seat in Mark Jacobson’s
classroom, eager to find out all about the composition
of the atmosphere, jet streams and pollutant transport.
“When I was younger, I used to watch the Weather Channel
with my mom, to see how storms form, stuff like that,” the
prospective psychology major says. “She thinks [taking
the course] is really cool and wishes she could sit in
on it.”
A couple of rows over from Alfred, Lucas Morton, ’02,
was jotting down an equation for the height of mercury
in a thermometer and puzzling over how carbon dioxide is
emitted anthropogenically as well as naturally. “I know
the basic physics,” says the first-year graduate student
in civil and environmental engineering. “But [Jacobson]
said a couple of things about the ozone layer that I didn’t
know. The material is definitely raising questions.”
Teaching
a course to liberal arts undergraduates, engineering graduate
students and everyone in between is an ongoing challenge
for Jacobson, ’87, MS ’88. As he launches the 13th
iteration of Weather and Storms, the associate professor
of civil and environmental engineering says the course
is still evolving. “For undergraduates, it’s basically, ‘If
you change pressure here, what happens to temperature there?’ while
graduate students get more complicated problems,” Jacobson
says. The subject matter, he says, is “challenging in
the sense that there are a lot of physical interactions
that become pretty complicated. But it’s nice in the
sense that because there aren’t a lot of numbers, this
information is something students will carry with them—concepts
they’ll
retain longer than equations.”
Jacobson, who directs
his department’s new master’s
program in atmosphere and energy, takes an engineer’s
practical approach to his courses and his research. Today,
he studies the impact of energy technologies on the atmosphere
largely because of a tennis match he played in Los Angeles
as a member of the Cardinal squad in the 1980s. “The
air pollution was really bad; it was something you could
see and feel. And you’re thinking, ‘Why should
this be here? We should solve this problem.’”
As
an undergraduate, Jacobson knew he wanted to major in engineering—but
which field? He took courses in five different engineering
disciplines one quarter, and was captivated by CE 170:
Environmental Science and Technology with teaching professor
Gil Masters, PhD ’66. “It
was easy to pick after that,
because in civil engineering I knew I could apply mathematics
and technological information to solving large-scale problems.”
Jacobson
understands the trepidation that nonscience majors feel
when they enter his classroom. Inserted among the slides
he shows on the first day of Weather and Storms—detailing
lenticular, wing and wave clouds—is one titled “Juggling-by-a-bear
cloud” that does indeed resemble a bruin peddling backward
in a circus act.
Topics can vary year to year—last year’s
class spent considerable time on the formation of hurricanes—but
typically include atmospheric moisture, global wind systems,
mid-latitude cyclones, thunderstorms and tornadoes. Homework
assignments may find students lying down on the ground
on a bright fall day to observe and classify clouds.
Students
also have to identify new weather data, chart it and analyze,
say, how pressure and temperature change as a result of
a passing front. “It’s really neat
when they come back and they’ve found data, and they
see exactly what you’re teaching theoretically,” Jacobson
says. “You expect that, but there are often competing
factors that can mess things up.” As any Weather Channel
aficionado would appreciate. |
