“WEATHER IN A TANK” Exploiting Laboratory Experiments in the Teaching of Meteorology, Oceanography, and Climate BY L. ILLARI, J. MARSHALL, P. BANNON, J. BOTELLA, R. CLARK, T. HAINE, A. KUMAR, S. LEE, K. J. MACKIN, G. A. MCKINLEY, M. MORGAN, R. NAJJAR, T. SIKORA, AND A. T ANDON Six universities collaborated to improve the teaching of atmosphere/ocean dynamics using rotating lab experiments and real-time data, in the process helping students move more adeptly between theory, models, and observations. A ccording to the American Meteorological Society (AMS), roughly 85 universities offer undergraduate degrees in meteorology and/or oceanography in the United States, and the undergraduate meteorology population is rapidly expanding (see Knox 2008). Laboratory fluid experiments, however, play a minor role in the education of these students. This is in the con- text of a field of research that is increasingly dominated by large coordinated programs to gather observations, present and ma- nipulate those observations using Web resources, and attempt to simulate them on the computer. We argue here that an educational experience that focuses on fundamentals, and involves the study of idealized abstractions in the context of real-world data, would greatly aid our students’ understanding and intuition about the dynamics of a fluid on a rotating, differentially heated sphere and how that dynamics helps to shape the climate of the Earth. To give an immediate example of the approach we advocate, Fig. 1 (following page) shows a satellite image of the Earth revealing midlatitude weather systems (the North Pole is in the middle) “stirring” properties between the Equator and the Pole. On the right is a dishpan laboratory experiment in which a bucket of ice placed in the center of a rotating tank of water induces a hori- zontal temperature gradient. Paper dots and colored dyes reveal circulation patterns in the laboratory that arise from the same fundamental principles that govern atmospheric synoptic-scale weather systems. The laboratory model is a simplified system that abstracts the essence of  Detail of patterns in Jupiter’s atmosphere. See Fig. 5 for more information