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UAH's Atmospheric and Earth Science Department is devoted to providing high-quality education to and to contributing international-caliber research in the areas of remote sensing, atmospheric chemistry and air pollution, radiative transfer, microwave radiometry, severe storms, numerical modeling, and climate-change modeling and measurements.
Research opportunities abound at UAH due largely to the nation’s concern about the environment. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Army Research Office (ARO), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) all fund atmospheric and earth science research at UAH.
Graduate students in the earth and atmospheric sciences come from a variety of disciplines: physics, chemistry, engineering, atmospheric, geophysical sciences, and applied mathematics. Opportunities are broad enough that each of these backgrounds is valuable for specific subfields within the earth and atmospheric sciences. However, students of earth and atmospheric sciences should have in common a sound background in the fundamentals of physics and applied mathematics and an interest in complex natural phenomena.
Students gain advanced knowledge of air quality, meteorology, atmospheric chemistry, micrometeorology, climate dynamics, mesoscale meteorology, and numerical weather prediction. Students graduate with the qualitative and quantitative skills necessary for professional research, teaching, and industry.
Students gain advanced knowledge of Earth system science by treating the Earth as an integrated system and by applying advanced principles from the natural and social sciences, including chemistry, physics, mathematics, hydrology, meteorology, ecology, economics, sociology, and geographic information systems. Earth system science seeks a deeper understanding of human interactions with the environment that determine the past, present and future states of the Earth and provides a holistic view for understanding the world and a pathway toward sustainability. Students graduate with the qualitative and quantitative skills necessary for employment in environmental risk assessment, public policy, decision-making and sustainability, and geospatial analysis and intelligence.
Develop expertise in understanding and predicting weather and climate systems through research opportunities in the doctoral program in atmospheric science. Your faculty mentors will push you to think about atmospheric theories, concepts and processes in new ways. You will learn to use research to answer questions that atmospheric scientists face today.
Atmospheric and Earth Science offers a Graduate GIS & Remote Sensing Certificate. A set of four graduate courses (12 credits) will provide an advanced background in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and prepare students for careers directly in the GIS field, geospatial intelligence with remote sensing, or give them GIS experience as a supplemental technical skills that can be applied across many disciplines and career fields. Given the popularity of GIS-based remote sensing and geospatial analysis in the Huntsville Area and across the U.S., the graduate certificate will also prepare students to recognize patterns and apply that information to larger processes.
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Applicants are strongly advised to explore our areas of research prior to applying. If you have an idea of the area you want to study but cannot find a match with our academics please contact the Department Chair.