All About Clouds (DRAKE HALL)

Lectures will be held on two mornings, one week apart. They aim to satisfy anyone's curiosity about clouds. The only prerequisites are an interest in clouds and the equivalent of a high-school science background. The illustrations will be photos, videos, charts, and graphs, but there will be no math. The lectures will cover four major subtopics: Cloud naming and cloud identification, how clouds form, what goes on inside of clouds, and the role of clouds in Colorado weather and climate. Two subtopics will be presented each day, with a short break in between. Supplemental materials will be provided. 

Tom Schlatter spent most of his career with NOAA, working to incorporate weather observations from many sources (surface stations, ships, ocean buoys, upper air balloons, aircraft, radars, and satellites) into computer prediction models. This work contributed to what is called the Rapid Update Cycle, an operational system that generates hourly analyses and short-range predictions of surface and upper atmospheric conditions. He was heavily involved with the NOAA Profiler Network of upward-looking radars that measure winds at various levels from the surface to five miles up and in planning for North American upper air observing systems. He held several posts at what is now NOAA’s Global Systems Laboratory: branch chief, division chief, and acting director, for six months in 2004. He retired from government service in 2004 and worked part-time with CIRES, a Cooperative Institute between NOAA and the University of Colorado. He retired from CIRES in 2009 but kept a desk as a volunteer at the Global Systems Laboratory until 2017 when he retired for good. He wrote a question-and-answer column about weather and climate for Weatherwise magazine for 37 years and has been taking cloud photographs since his college days.

Notes

• A current OLLI membership is required to register for all courses and lectures.
• If you do not have a Spring 25 membership, one will be added to your cart at checkout.
• OLLI membership fees and course tuition are critical to the Institute's sustainability and are non-refundable.

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