ATMS 360 Homework and Course Deliverables (return to main page)

Keep a notebook of your accomplishments as described below.
Notebooks will be graded at midterm and final.
You can optionally print out and add the reading assignments to your notebook. It is a good idea to outline your reading.

LAB 3. Sunphotometer lab. We will use the hand held sun photometers to measure the aerosol optical depth.

a) Here is the lab description, with information sufficient to obtain aerosol optical depth.

b) In addition, compare your sunphotometer aerosol optical depth measurements with those obtained by the Cimel sunphotometer and the hand held spectrometer based sun photometer.

c) As a summary, explain why sun photometery is so useful and important.

HELPFUL RELATED INFORMATION:
Sunphotometer lecture notes.
Presentation on sunphotometers and solar radiation.
Example of sunphotometer measurements on 27 June 2007.

LAB 2. The purpose of this lab is to become familiar with 'common' measurements of solar and infrared radiation in the atmosphere. We will cover the topics of irradiance, radiance, and radiative heating in class. Then do the following for this laboratory exercise.

a). Define, discuss, make drawings to illustrate, and convey an understanding of the following concepts: irradance, radiance, downwelling radiation, upwelling radiation, direct solar radiation, diffuse solar radiation, and global radiation. Some of these terms are used interchangeably. A good place to go for definitions of this sort is the 'Meteorological Glossary'. A nice site showing the solar concepts with graphics is this one.

b). Go to the UNR weather station site and make and interpret overlay graphs in metric units of the following (all for 1 through 7 February):
i). Solar irradiance and temperature.
ii). Temperature and relative humidity.
iii). Solar irradiance and infrared irradiance.
iv). Infrared irradiance and temperature.
v). Infrared irradiance and relative humidity.
You should be able to interpret when it is cloudy or partly cloudy, day or night, and should be able to interpret, with some thought, how relative humidity plays a role in the downwelling IR.

c). Get the graphs for the solar radiation (global, direct, and diffuse) and infrared radiation for all sites from around the world, on 14 February 2012, and interpret them.

d). Extra credit, or project idea for later on. Create a multi wavelength LED based irradiance detector for different color LEDs and deploy it out the window of the class room (through the wire port hole we will be making soon). Set up an Arduino to data log the results to your computer at your station. Consider working with a separate group and have one group measure the uplooking irradiance while the other group measures the downlooking irradiance. Interpret your results in terms of the surface albedo.

e). Extra credit, or project idea. Calibrate some thermistors and bury them at various depths in the soil, at 10 cm intervals. Measure and interpret the temperatures you get. You can set up an Arduino to data log them to your computer.

LAB 1.
a). Read and thoroughly digest pages 1 through 20 in basic electricity.
b). Read and enjoy pages 1-1 through 1-4 on the history of operational amplifiers from opamps4all.
c). Read my brief introduction to operational amplifiers.
d). Advanced reading of pages 2-1 through 2-12, especially for content, and for Ohm's law discussion (from opamps4all.)
e). Read to understand how opamps work, pages 3-1 through 3-6 (from opamps4all.)
f). Advanced reading of the rest of chapter 3 on opamps (from opamps4all.)

g). Basic Circuits Laboratory for your notebook.
READ: Here is the section on series and parallel circuits and resistor, capacitor descriptions.
READ: Here is the section on semiconductors and LEDs. The section continues here.

h). Print out your schematic for the transimpedance amplifier, and the board layout. Add it to your notebook with a discussion of what it does, how it works.



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