Ron Smith opens Yale's Atmosphere, the Ocean and Environmental Change with a course overview and a real-time case study: Hurricane Irene, which had struck Connecticut days earlier on August 28. He pulls up satellite images, radar loops, and tide gauge readings for New Haven to show students how meteorologists track a storm as it happens, then turns to his own background and research interests in atmospheric dynamics. The lecture closes with the course's first real content question, what is an atmosphere, framing it through gravity and gas composition, and why an invisible mix of gases becomes perceptible to us only through wind, pressure changes, and weather events like the one just observed. It sets up the quantitative and qualitative approach the rest of the course will use to study Earth's climate system.