---
title: ATM S 559
#feed_description: 
author: Issa Rice
creation_date: 2015-06-11
last_major_revision_date: 2015-06-11
language: English
# accepts "notes", "draft", "in progress", or "mostly finished"
status: notes
# accepts "certain", "highly likely", "likely", "possible", "unlikely",
# "highly unlikely", "remote", "impossible", "log", "emotional", or
# "fiction"
belief: possible
# accepts "CC0", "CC-BY", or "CC-BY-SA"
license: CC-BY
tags: uw course, spring 2015, atmos
#aliases: 
---

This is my course review for atmospheric science 559. I took the course
in spring 2015 with Cecilia Bitz.
This is the first (and so far only) graduate level course I have taken at UW, and---especially compared to the intro-level weed-out freshman courses I was forced to take throughout my first year---as a result, I had a very different experience from that in my other courses.

some remarks only for now:

- a "reading course", so instead of textbooks, we mostly read actual climate modelling papers (which were especially difficult to process since I hadn't had prior exposure)
    - and had short reading questions
- i had *significant* interaction^[basically: going in to office hours ~5 times throughout the quarter, getting help running the models, help with understanding the actual science, and so on.] with the professor, unlike all my other under grad courses (with the possible exception of math 13X, where i went in to the TA's office hours semi-frequently so that i got help that way, but even then it wasn't with the instructor of the course)
- the topics were really diverse, and even though it was all about climate modelling, it was still very much a "breadth approach"
    - because of this, the professor actually brought in other professors/atmospheric scientists to lecture on their specialized topics
- basically the grad lvl equivalent of atmos 380?
- no exams or quizzes, no real in-class participation required (though i did go to most of the lectures)
- final project included a presentation, and i didn't realize how stressful this would turn out to be... although the actual presentation didn't turn out to be that scary
- hmm, so im not sure how to articulate this correctly, but i did feel that i got to understand better "how atmospheric scientists think", e.g. their thought processes as they look at a figure or w/e
- i got to learn the rudiments of matlab, though i really don't understand how it works ... (especially how it deals with figures, e.g. i got some extremely odd figures)
- workload isn't much *if* you know what you're doing
- interestingly, many of the other students didn't seem to have a lot of experience with unix/commandline stuff. although some of the people definitely knew more than i did.
- i would *not* recommend that other first-year students or students with no prior experience in atmospheric science take this course!