I taught this course in Spring 2015 – usually Professor Matt Eastin teaches it. Atmospheric thermodynamics is the study of how air moves and stays still in the atmosphere. This is the heart of every aspect of atmospheric sciences, weather forecasting, and climate science. We study atmospheric composition, equation of state, hydrostatics, first and second laws of thermodynamics for dry, moist, and saturated air, atmospheric stability, parcel buoyancy, and thermodynamic diagrams. We learn to decode all the information packed into a “Skew T” chart like this one:
We work our way through the ideal gas law, the 1st law of thermodynamics, the 2nd law, and then learned all about how to evaluate the stability in the atmosphere via skew-T charts and via brute force equations. Check out the data collected by a balloon launched into the atmosphere from all around the world.