Introduction to MATLAB for Oceanographic Data
Anna Pfeiffer-Herbert, Stockton University
This activity introduces students to loading and plotting data in MATLAB. Students explore scalar and vector time series and profile data commonly used in the field of Oceanography using data sets from publicly ...

Numerical Simulation Basics: Part II – Boundary Conditions & Numerical Stability for a Finite-Difference Equation
Jim Boyle, Western Connecticut State University
This is the second and last activity teaching numerical simulation basics to students in a junior-level physical oceanography course. In the first activity students program solutions for a 1st order differential ...

Stress Map
James Conder, Southern Illinois University Carbondale
Use earthquakes from the global CMT catalog to look at crustal stresses in a given region of the Earth. Students will download earthquake data from an online catalog and make 2 tectonic maps. One map is of the ...

Numerical Simulation Basics: Accuracy and Model Validation for a Finite-difference Equation
Jim Boyle, Western Connecticut State University
This activity teaches students a few of the basic concepts for numerical simulation of physical systems by modeling the simple and well-known problem of free-fall. The recursion relation for the finite-difference ...

Climate change and extreme values analysis
Alexandre Martinez, University of California-Irvine
In this activity, we learn where to get climate data (monthly temperature maxima and monthly precipitation maxima) from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). We learn how to fit a GEV ...

Signal processing and earthquake triggering
Jackie Caplan-Auerbach, Western Washington University
In this exercise, written for an undergraduate seismology class, students use MATLAB to analyze waveforms from the 2004 Sumatra M9.0 earthquake, as they were recorded on three seismic stations in Alaska. Two of ...

Gravity prospecting
James Conder, Southern Illinois University Carbondale
Students are given a set of gravity data with the aim of finding high density anomalies in the subsurface. Keywords: Data analysis; inverse modeling

Monitoring Algal Blooms with Landsat (OLI)
Andrew Fischer, university of tasmania
Algal blooms are caused by an aggregation of either microscopic phytoplankton or macro algae. They can produce toxic or harmful effects on humans and or the ecosystem. The purpose of this activity is to teach ...

Glacier Flow Model and Introduction to Monte Carlo Methods
Dan Morgan, Vanderbilt University
The goal of this assignment is for students to recognize that adding some randomization and "noise" to a model yields different results each time we run the model, and we can pull some useful statistics ...

Global Warming: A Zonal Energy Balance Model
Victor Padron, Normandale Community College
This is a teaching module, directed to undergraduate students in applied mathematics, that presents a Zonal Energy Balance Model to describe the evolution of the latitudinal distribution of Earth's surface ...