General Circulation of the Earth's Atmosphere
MIT OpenCourseWare offers this graduate-level course on the large-scale dynamics of the atmosphere. Lectures work through diagnostic studies of observed atmospheric structure and use them to test theories of general circulation, including angular momentum and energy balance, jet streams, and the behavior of planetary waves. Students examine how general circulation models are built, validated, and used as analogs for the real atmosphere, comparing model output against observational data. Materials include lecture notes, problem sets, and readings drawn from the atmospheric sciences literature, all freely downloadable through MIT's OpenCourseWare platform. No certificate is offered, but the full set of course materials lets a self-directed learner work through the same content MIT students use, provided they already have a background in fluid dynamics or atmospheric physics.