15 Years of Teaching Atmospheric Dynamics to Undergraduates via an Introduction to Data Assimilation Course

Beginning in 2002 the University of Georgia (UGA) pioneered education in data assimilation targeted primarily at the undergraduate level. This presentation will chronicle how data assimilation has been woven into atmospheric dynamics courses at UGA, and is now taught as a stand-alone lecture-and-laboratory course counting for advanced atmospheric dynamics credit at UGA. Atmospheric dynamics topics including gravity wave and Rossby wave dynamics, inertial oscillations, geostrophic adjustment, the shallow water equations, quasi-geostrophic balance, nonlinear balance, chaos theory, and (of course) numerical weather prediction are addressed in this course, spanning much of the syllabus of a more conventional second-semester atmospheric dynamics course. The advantages and disadvantages of this approach to advanced atmospheric dynamics education are discussed in the context of student feedback on multiple offerings of the Introduction to Data Assimilation course at UGA.