Graduate Studies

Doctoral Concentrations: Climate & Remote Sensing

Admission Eligibility:

Admission to the program is open to any student admitted to the graduate programs of the AOSS Department with the consent of one of the three GRS Program Advisors. The usual course of action for students is to enter the program at the beginning of their graduate career. However, students may enter the program at any time in their graduate program with consent of one of the GRS Program Advisors, provided they have fulfilled the requirements for satisfactory progress in the GRS Program.

Relevant Research in AOSS:

Designing, building, testing and operating remote sensing instruments and analyzing their data from ground, airborne, and space based platforms.
Land Surface Process/Radiobrightness (LSP/R) models which link the surface fluxes of energy and moisture to soil moisture and to the natural radio emission detected by microwave remote sensing instruments.
Micro and macro physical cloud and precipitation formation and evolution
Numerical inversion algorithms for the estimation of geophysical state variables from electromagnetic emission and scattering signatures.
Collaborating with major governmental and industrial aerospace instrument developers to design, test and operate spaceborne remote sensing platforms.

The AOSS Space Physics Research Laboratory (SPRL ) is one of the leading institutions in the research of the atmospheres, ionospheres and plasma environments of Earth and other solar system bodies. It has more than 50 years of experience in experimental and theoretical investigations of the space environment.

AOSS research is supported by an annual sponsored research budget of about $15 million, with projects ranging from "small science" through intermediate size projects, to multimillion dollar per year endeavors.

Program Description/Course Requirements:

The AOSS Ph.D. Program is an integrated study designed to give students first a broad base of study in atmospheric, space and planetary sciences followed by more in-depth, concentrated studies in specific areas. There are four levels of courses required of AOSS graduate students:

Departmental Core Courses: Required of all AOSS graduate students
Program Core Courses: Required courses in atmospheric or space and planetary sciences
Concentration Core Courses: Required courses in your specific area of study
Program Elective Courses: Courses designed to complement your program

AOSS Graduate Program Structure(PDF file)

Departmental Core Courses

AOSS 551: Geophysical Fluid Dynamics
AOSS 532: Radiative Transfer
AOSS 747, 749: Seminar

Atmospheric Program Core Courses

AOSS 475: Earth, Atmosphere and Ocean Interactions
AOSS 479: Atmospheric Chemistry
AOSS 411: Clouds, Aerosols and Precipitation

Climate and Remote Sensing Concentration Core Courses

AOSS 6XX: radiative transfer II
AOSS 410: earth system modeling
AOSS 451: Atmospheric dynamics

Climate and Remote Sensing Concentration Elective Courses

AOSS 585: Remote Sensing and Inversion Theory
EECS 501: Probability and Random Processes
EECS 530: Electricity and Magnetism
EECS 532: Microwave Remote Sensing
Math 571, 572: Numerical Methods
AOSS 468: Data Analysis
AERO 523: Computational Fluid Dynamics

Qualifying Exams (PDF File)

Dissertation

Following the successful completion of the qualifying examinations, the student forms a dissertation committee composed of five faculty members. The committee must be chaired by a qualified faculty member from one of the departments and have at least two members from the other department. Students should set a date for their oral preliminary examination by the end of their third year. The dissertation committee will give the preliminary examination and it will be based on a written thesis research proposal.

M.S. Degree:

A Masters of Science Degree will be awarded to those students who have enough credit hours and satisfy the formal M.Sc. requirements and request such a degree. We expect that the majority of students admitted to this program will earn a Ph.D., but we include this possibility especially for those students who cannot or do not want to go through the whole program.