Trace Gases: Stella II Mac and PC

Activity and Starting Point page by R.M. MacKay. Clark College, Physics and Meteorology.

This activity has been accepted by a Panel Peer Review.

This resource received an Accept or Accept with minor revisions rating from a Panel Peer Review process

These materials were reviewed using face-to-face NSF-style review panel of geoscience and geoscience education experts to review groups of resources addressing a single theme. Panelists wrote reviews that addressed the criteria:

scientific accuracy and currency
usability and
pedagogical effectiveness

Reviewers rated the resources:

Accept
Accept with minor revisions
Accept with major revisions, or
Reject.

They also singled out those resources they considered particularly exemplary, which are given a gold star rating.

Following the panel meetings, the conveners wrote summaries of the panel discussion for each resource; these were transmitted to the creator, along with anonymous versions of the reviews. Relatively few resources were accepted as is. In most cases, the majority of the resources were either designated as 1) Reject or 2) Accept with major revisions. Resources were most often rejected for their lack of completeness to be used in a classroom or they contained scientific inaccuracies.

This page first made public: Aug 9, 2006

This material was originally created for Starting Point:Introductory Geology
and is replicated here as part of the SERC Pedagogic Service.

Summary

This Stella model allows students to learn about chemical mass balance in the atmosphere and apply this to atmospheric chlorofluorocarbon (important for ozone depletion) and carbon dioxide (important for global warming) concentration changes.

Learning Goals

Terms: atmospheric life-time, source emission strength, and equilibrium concentration.
Learn about chemical mass balance of the global atmosphere.
Understand the relationship between atmospheric life-time, source emission strength, and equilibrium concentration.
Apply this to CFC concentration changes before and after international policies calling for the phase out of CFC production.
Calibrate Model to 1958 to 2000 Mauna Loa CO₂ observations and then use model to estimate future CO₂ concentrations.

Context for Use

Can be used in an introductory geoscience class with content related to global warming, ozone depletion, or global scale atmospheric pollution.

Description and Teaching Materials

Mac Version

Mac Version of Atmospheric Trace Gas Assignment ( 40kB May19 03) is a complete activity archive (*.sit) with Stella Model and MS word activity document.

PC Version

PC Version of Atmospheric Trace Gas Assignment ( 52kB Jun5 03) is a complete activity archive (*.zip) with Stella Model and MS word activity document. Right click and save it to your disk in *.zip format so it can be unzipped with WinZip. You will need WinZip to unzip these files. An evaluation copy of WinZip is available at WinZip.com .

Teaching Notes and Tips

Activity takes about 2 hours to complete. If you do not have Stella at your school you can download a free demo version of Stella from High Performance Systems, Inc.

Assessment

Teaching materials contain a student activity that can help promote and assess student learning.

References and Resources

An updated JAVA version of this activity is available here. It runs best on a PC but has run on Mac OS 10.2.4 with Mozilla browser.

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