Academic Affiliate Renewal

3. Lyndon State College

Lyndon State College has been an affiliate member of UCAR since 1991. The Department of Meteorology at Lyndon State College offers a Batchelor of Science degree in Meteorology. In the last five years, they have also added degrees associating meteorology with applied math, with computer science and with GIS. The Department includes four faculty members, all of which are tenured. The department has a broad range of courses, with particular emphasis on synoptic meteorology, atmospheric dynamics and data analysis. The Department also has a strong involvement in television weathercasting. The Department is currently in the process of establishing an Institute for Applied Meteorology in conjunction with local businesses and a Certificate of Advanced Study in Meteorology.

Facilities focus particularly around their Met Lab, the principle teaching space. This classroom includes 19 personal computer workstations. Their Annex serves as additional space for homework and research; it contains six more workstations. All 25 machines can be used in parallel as a computing cluster for larger scale computing. They have a fully instrumented, local weather observing system. In addition, there are various capabilities for synoptic analysis, including the NOAAPort data, Unidata data, and the WSI WeatherProducer system, along with various graphics and data analysis software. They are also a participant in Suominet.

The Department has over 100 students, and has been graduating 11-14 students each year for the last five years. They project graduate rates to increase in the future.

Faculty at Lyndon State are and have been actively involved with UCAR, including membership on the Unidata Steering Committee, the Unidata Metapps task force, the Unidata Users Committee, and involvement in various COMET and Unidata meetings, as well as the annual UCAR meetings. The only external research support appears to be a NSF grant received by Professor Atkins.

The Membership Committee concludes that the criteria for membership in the UCAR Academic Affiliates Program have been fulfilled and, as provided by the bylaws, approves the continuation of Lyndon State College as an Academic Affiliate.

This page updated 2004-09-28 15:01 -07 by Michelle Flores
Contact: Susan Warner (303) 497-1655; swarner@ucar.edu