McGill Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences

History

Since 1840, Charles Smallwood, a medical doctor and avid amateur meteorologist, was taking daily weather reports at his house in the village of Saint-Martin on Île Jésus (now Laval a suburb of Montreal). He was named "honorary professor" in Meteorology at McGill University in 1856, and at his suggestion, the first McGill Weather Observatory was established in 1862.{{Cite web |author-link=J. Stewart Marshall |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070729215226/http://www.radar.mcgill.ca/3McGillObs.pdf |archive-date=2007-07-29 |url-status=dead

After the death of Smallwood in 1873, the position of professor in Meteorology was not filled for 88 years. However, the director of the Observatory was, and the second to occupy this post was the engineer C. H. McLeod, an assistant to Smallwood since his university days. McLeod began his term while Canada was setting up a Meteorological Service. He was instrumental to its development and to research on the subject by McGill. Professors of the McGill's Physics department began to work on meteorological projects and later, professors from Geography did too.

Following the Second World War, two active atmospheric research groups emerged at McGill. Dr J. Stewart Marshall and R.H. Douglas led a radar meteorology group (Stormy Weather Group) in the Physics Department, and Dr F. Kenneth Hare directed an arctic meteorology program in Geography.{{Cite web |author-link=J. S. Marshall Radar Observatory |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110706185139/http://www.radar.mcgill.ca/who-we-are/history.html |archive-date=2011-07-06 |url-status=dead

Since 1850, McGill has been involved in oceanography but the main development in this field came when the Centre for Marine Studies was created in 1963, later renamed Oceanographical Institute. Under the leadership of Dr Max J. Dunbar, the Institute was managing Master and Doctorate programs in physical oceanography, and marine biology. In 1987, the Institute because the McGill department of Oceanography. In January 1992, the Meteorology department became the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences when the Oceanography department merged with it.

Since its creation, the department has been a Canadian leader in the training of many distinguished atmospheric scientists. McGill has awarded over 230 M.Sc. degrees and more than 80 Ph.D. degrees in this field.

Programs

The department offers a BSc degree, with courses in atmospheric dynamics, thermodynamics and chemistry, in cloud physics, in climatology and general oceanography. The students maybe follow training toward research, a teaching, or operational meteorologist. The department offers one year certificates for students coming from other departments, like physics, to pursue M.Sc. and Ph.D. programs in meteorology and oceanography.

In M.Sc. and Ph.D., the speciality are:{{Cite web

• Atmospheric chemistry
• Dynamics of climates and paleoclimates
• Physical meteorology physique and cloud physics
• Atmospheric dynamics and synoptic scale meteorology
• Data analysis and numerical weather predictions
• Convection and other severe weather
• Fluid dynamics and turbulence
• Physical oceanography
• Weather radar and remote sensing of precipitation

References