Monash University Handbook

Environmental problem solving and visualisation will provide the students with the ability to solve a wide-ranging set of common problems in environmental and climate science. Through practical problem solving it will introduce methods and techniques used in environmental and climate science to collect and analyse data, to build quantitative models and to visualise key results. The unit will discuss a number of environmental and climate science problem-based topics involving observing and modelling the earth. Simple techniques and methods from the fields of mathematics, physics and information technology will be introduced successively in the context of real-world problems and will enable students to apply these necessary skills in the higher level units in the Earth science major streams of Earth's physical environment and Earth's climate.

Outcomes

On completion of this unit students should be able to:

Understand the basic methods for data analysis and scientific modelling of environmental and climate science.
Make statistical analysis of environmental and climate data sets with numerical methods and visualise their results using common tools, such as GIS or MATLAB.
Analyse simple models in terms of sensitivities, quantitative and qualitative relationships.
Build simple quantitative models based theoretical knowledge or statistical data analysis.
Communicate clearly the key concepts covered in the unit, both verbally and in written form.

Assessment

Practicals, quizzes, assignments or presentations: 40%

Mid-term tests: 10%

Examination (2 hours): 50%

Workload requirements

The workload to achieve the learning outcomes for this unit is 144 hours spread across the semester (approximately 12 hours per week) - approximately an even mixture of attendance at scheduled activities and self-scheduled study time. Learning activities comprise a mixture of instructor directed, peer-directed and self-directed learning, which includes face-to-face and online engagement.