Graduate Program Overview

The Department of Meteorology at Penn State is one of the oldest and largest in the country. It offers individually tailored graduate programs of academic study leading to the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees.

Together with a rich tradition of excellence in teaching and advising, the faculty has both a strong commitment to fundamental research and an active role in national and international scientific administration. Faculty advisers will help you develop an understanding of both basic and advanced material. The department's goal is to give you the broad-based knowledge and research tools to understand and solve contemporary problems in the atmospheric and oceanic sciences.

The diverse teaching and research interests of the faculty and the varied research activities of students encompass the full range of specialty areas in the atmospheric sciences. With faculty specializing in dynamic and physical meteorology, the theory of large-scale and mesoscale motions, synoptic and numerical weather analysis and prediction, tropical meteorology, climate theory and modeling, radiative transfer, oceanography and its relationship to climate, atmospheric turbulence, the theory and practice of direct and remote atmospheric measurements and sounding, the theory and laboratory study of atmospheric precipitation mechanisms, and atmospheric chemistry, you will have an expert on hand for help on almost any topic in the atmospheric science that arises. A general open-door policy by all faculty encourages students to interact with faculty from a wide range of specialties.

Several members of the graduate faculty are associates of the Earth System Science Center, which was developed within the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences to foster interactions among faculty and students with diverse interests in the earth sciences. Other interdisciplinary programs are encouraged in applied mathematics, fluid mechanics, air pollution and atmospheric chemistry, and biometeorology. ensemble forecasting, and bioclimatology.

Graduate Brochure [PDF 3.32MB]