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Course Criteria
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4.00 Credits
Introduction to climate studies, including beginnings of the solar system, time scales, and climate in human history; methods for detecting climate change, including proxies, ice cores, instrumental records, and time series analysis; physical and chemical processes in climate, including primordial atmosphere, ozone chemistry, carbon and oxygen cycles, and heat and water budgets; internal feedback mechanisms, including ice, aerosols, water vapor, clouds, and ocean circulation; climate forcing, including orbital variations, volcanism, plate tectonics, and solar variability; climate models and mechanisms of variability, including energy balance, coupled models, and global ocean and atmosphere models; and outstanding problems. Students taking the graduate version complete different assignments.
Prerequisite:
Prereq: Chemistry (GIR), 18.03, or permission of instructor
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3.00 Credits
Explores how scientific information and quantitative models can be used to inform policy decision-making. Develops an understanding of quantitative modeling techniques and their role in the policy process through case studies and interactive activities. Addresses issues such as analysis of scientific assessment processes, uses of integrated assessment models, public perception of quantitative information, methods for dealing with uncertainties, and design choices in building policy-relevant models. Examples focus on models and information used in Earth system governance.
Prerequisite:
Prereq: ESD.10 or permission of instructor
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3.00 Credits
Introduces and develops core ideas and concepts in the field of sustainability science and engineering from an engineering systems perspective. Takes an interdisciplinary approach to discuss case studies of sustainability systems research. Exposes students to techniques for sustainability research across engineering, natural and social science disciplines. Term projects focus on applying techniques.
Prerequisite:
Prereq: permission of instructor
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3.00 Credits
Practical introduction to the international environmental political arena, particularly designed for science and engineering students whose work is potentially relevant to global environmental issues. Covers basic issues in international politics, such as negotiations, North-South conflict, implementation and compliance, and trade. Emphasizes the roles and responsibilities of experts providing scientific assessment reports and in technical advisory bodies. Term projects focus on organizing and presenting scientific information in ways relevant for ongoing global policymaking.
Prerequisite:
Prereq: None
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3.00 Credits
Introduces scientific, economic, and ecological issues underlying the threat of global climate change, and the institutions engaged in negotiating an international response. Develops an integrated approach to analysis of climate change processes, and assessment of proposed policy measures, drawing on research and model development within the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change. Graduate students are expected to explore the topic in greater depth through reading and individual research.
Prerequisite:
Prereq: Calculus II (GIR); 5.60; 14.01 or 15.010; or permission of instructor
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3.00 Credits
Introduction to the dynamics of flow over the continental shelf, emphasizing both theory and observations. Content varies somewhat according to student and staff interests. Possible topics include fronts, buoyant plumes, surface and bottom boundary layers, wind-driven upwelling, coastal-trapped waves, internal waves, quasi-steady flows, high-latitude shelf processes, tides, and shelf-open ocean interactions.
Prerequisite:
Prereq: 12.800
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3.00 Credits
More specialized topics in the dynamics of flow over the continental shelf, including coastal-trapped waves, wind-driving, and mean flows. Emphasis on the relationship between theory and observations. Instrumentation and the application of statistical techniques also covered.
Prerequisite:
Prereq: 12.862 or permission of instructor
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3.00 Credits
A review of wind-driven circulation, and the development of the baroclinic theory of the wind-driven circulation. Potential vorticity homohenization and the ventilated thermocline. Wind-driven circulation with continuous stratification, subduction/obduction. Equatorial thermocline and its relation to ENSO. Decadal climate variability. Thermohaline circulation and variability. Abyssal circulation. Mixing and energetics of the oceanic general circulation.
Prerequisite:
Prereq: 12.800, 12.801, 12.802
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3.00 Credits
Addresses the phenomena of tidal and solar insolation (Milankovitch theory) forcing in parallel, using one to illuminate the other. Describes their roles in the modern and paleoclimate systems. Uses real records as exercises in the practical application of time series and modeling methods.
Prerequisite:
Prereq: 12.301 or 12.842; 18.03 or permission of instructor
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3.00 Credits
Addresses the interaction of the atmosphere and ocean on temporal scales from seconds to days and spatial scales from centimeters to kilometers. Topics include the generation, propagation, and decay of surface waves; the processes by which mass, heat, momentum, and energy are transported vertically within the coupled atmospheric and oceanic boundary layers and across the air-sea interface; and the statistical tools, mathematical models, and observational methods that are used to quantify these processes.
Prerequisite:
Prereq: Graduate-level fluid mechanics and a subject on waves, or permission of instructor
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