Irish Weather History course

It's an interesting idea, a question

Is it going to be a course for historians or for meteorologists? I am not sure if it would be suitable for a Msc meteorology course since you don't really have time during the study for a full course of case studies.

I think a short course on the history of meteorology in Ireland rather than weather would also be interesting.

Manach wrote: »

A course on weather would be of interest to historians, between the mini ice age that decimated the Viking colonies in Greenland to the ice storms that decimated the Armies of Napoleon on their retreat from Moscow, an appreciation of weather and its effects has always been key factor in the study of History. Thus the OP has an good idea for a course.

There is even quite a bit of joint research nowadays between historians and meteorologists/hydrologists/geographers on trying to extend the knowledge of hydro-meteorological events beyond the instrumented period (which only goes back slightly over 100 years) by analysing historical sources to try to get information on flood and climate events. I am sure I have read somewhere too of someone looking at famine events recorded in the Annals with a view to linking them to climate events.

There is a session on it at the EGU which might be of interest to you OP, you can click on the 'orals' and 'posters' links in this link to see what the research looks like http://meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/EGU2016/session/20234



As a course just for meteorologists I am not so convinced, as time is quite limited and there is a lot to learn, also with a focus on not so the much extremes but more on the normal every week weather events that happen in Ireland. There is so much involved in explaining how a normal weather system develops that a course just looking at a different weather extremes would teach the students enough (at a masters student level, for an early semester bachelor degree where there would be less of a focus on mathematics it might be ok). It's also more important for budding forecasters to spend as much time as possible working on these events, as they will be their bread and butter if they go to work for Met Eireann.

I can give you a quick run down of the masters studies which I did at UCD years ago but is no longer offered.

1st semester
Synoptic meteorology (data from stations, charts, frontal analysis)
Dynamical meteorology (fluid mechanics, conservation laws, basic equations, vorticity equation, quasi-geostrophic analysis, perturbation theory)
Physical meteorology (basic laws of the atmosphere, cloud physics)

2nd semester
Climate physics (energy balance, radiative transfer theory, general circulation)
Numerical Weather Prediction (data assimilation, solving equations, computer programming)
Synoptic Meteorology 2 (cyclogenesis, development and trajectory using simplified versions of the equations learned in the Dynamical course)

So this is a lot of work but it still barely touches on a lot of areas of meteorology, I think one of the reasons being it was aimed at students who would go on to work for Met Eireann so the main focus was on work they do there..

So I'd see it hard for your course on it's own to fit in as an addition to the above.. but as a part of the synoptic meteorology modules it could certainly work. There we would sometimes look at historical events and analyse them, but not just focusing on them. And they would usually be short term events, like a storm or so rather than an entire winter.

There might not be a textbook, but analysis of historical events is sometimes done as a masters thesis by a student who did the course, and it might be possible to use. Also before you would be in a position to teach you will have needed to do at least a bachelor study and probably a masters thesis yourself so you could analyse a few events as part of that.

I hope the above is of some interest to you, I wrote it in quite a rambling way I think