ORGANIZATION OF STUDENT ACTIVITIES IN THE ATMOSPHERIC MEASUREMENT LABORATORY

A new three year course for the degree in “Physics of the Atmosphere and Meteorology” started in 2001 at the University of Bologna. Since that, I teach “Atmospheric Measurement Laboratory”, a 6 credit course of 65 hours, one third of which are lectures and the others lab work and data analysis. When in 2002 a first level master in “Applied Meteorology” was also activated, I began to teach a second course, a little more advanced but on the same subjects. A relevant part of both teachings are the experimental activities, which are crucial in order to guide students to a conscious use of meteorological instruments, as well as to a correct analysis of the data representativeness. As first nucleus of activities, we have begun to set-up, with direct cooperation of students, three units of an automatic weather station (AWS project). As interface circuit between the sensors and the PC we have selected a low cost card made by National Instruments; for the data acquisition and signal processing, we develop dedicated software codes in the LabVIEW environment. At present, we have interfaced temperature sensors, again by National Instrument, by which we have set-up an original version of on-line psychrometer. The sensor calibration (negligible self-heating, accuracy and time response according to the WMO recommendations), as well as the control of all the psychrometer design, has been a stimulating task for students: they have must become aware of how to properly build the instrument in order to guarantee its intrinsic accuracy. Students of the next year will go on in the AWS project, by interfacing two new sensors, a barometer and a sonic anemometer, both made by Vaisala. A second nucleus of educational activities is around three commercial, semi-professional, automatic weather stations. Each group of students has one weather station under his control, from the beginning to the end of the course, and must maintain up-to-date the metadata. We suggest different tasks and ask several questions to students; the main aim is to drive them to check, for what it is possible, the quality and the representativeness of the data, comparing the results given by the different stations, with particular reference to the sensor exposition. The lab of atmospheric measurements is opened to visits of classes of high school students; among them the measure of relative humidity by the psychrometer technique has got a big success, and they tried to repeat it in their schools, by using the traditional version of this instrument.