FIRE Climate Computing: A Course-Based Undergraduate Research Experience in Climate Modeling for First-Year Undergraduates

Citizens of a thriving planet educate the next generation in the field of climate and climate change through experiential learning. The First-Year Innovation & Research Experience (FIRE) program provides first-year University of Maryland College Park students with an inclusive faculty-mentored course-based 3-semester research experience that drives accelerated career readiness and opportunity among a broad array of disciplines and fields, including atmospheric science through the Climate Computing stream. All FIRE students take an Introduction to Research course during their first semester at UMD, where they learn how to read, engage with, and communicate about existing research. During the second semester of the program, Climate Computing students learn to apply programming and scripting to understand basic weather and climate information and spatial data. This leads to two miniature team projects where they learn how to run weather (WRF) and climate models (CESM) on the NCAR Supercomputer (Derecho) from pre- to post-processing. The final semester allows students to develop and execute their own model-based experiments in teams. This presentation will provide insight and methods for guiding students of varying interests, most of which will not major in atmospheric science, through weather and climate modeling research while emphasizing the larger skills students can apply in other careers and disciplines.