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.
