California State University, Bakersfield has been designated as a Hispanic-serving institution. It resides in the southern end of California’s Central Valley. CSUB’s service area has a population of about half a million people, and is about one hundred miles away from the nearest university. The university offers a BS in (among other fields) Biology (which offers a concentration in Environmental Studies), Geology, Environmental Resource Management, and Physics, and an MS in Geology. Surprisingly, up to now there had not been a single class in the entire curriculum to explore weather phenomena at any depth – either at CSUB, or the local Community Colleges.

The class, named Introduction to Weather Dynamics, was approved by the university, and it will satisfy a General Education requirement. The class was originally designed by the AMS as an online course, so that weekly activities could be made more relevant to the student through their focus on current weather; however, the course was meant as a one-semester course, whereas CSUB is on a quarter calendar. We will make use of activities which the AMS has in online archives to wait for a few weeks until the current-weather activities start coming online. We will offer the class for the first time during the winter quarter, 2003. It will not be offered as an online course. It will meet in a computer laboratory.