Meteorology 5120/6120 Numerical Weather Prediction

Prerequisite:The course is resonably self-contained, and does not require mathmatics courses in numerical methods, although those courses are useful to broaden the students background and technical vocabulary. Prior lecture and laboratory material on the dynamics and synoptics of large-scale flow, and some working ability on the local workstation cluster will be important.

Purpose of Course: The goals of these courses are to describe finite difference methods that are used to approximate the equations of motion in the process of numerical weather prediction.

Grading: There will be three scheduled mid-term examinations each worth 100 points. The final examination will amount to 200 points. Problems will be assigned as background material for discussions and exams. The purpose of the homework is to motivate as well as prepare for tests.

Text:There is no required text.

Lecture Topics:

I	Numerical Concepts
II	Time Differencing
III	Space Differencing
IV	Boundary Value Problems and Relaxation
V	Dynamic Atmospheric Models

The first four subjects refer to numerical methods that will be discribed for simple prototype equations, and the last subject refers to a dynamical model that can be used for prediction. There will be a series of homework problems designed to develop insight in truncation errors and stability characteristics of numerical methods. An abbreviated outline of the lecture material will be handed out for subjects I-IV above.