The principal part of this course (60%) will be your lab. experiments. There will also be a "Theory of Instrumentation & Measurements" component (40%), for which the "textbook" will be these web notes - some (but not all) of which material will also be gone through in class (if we do not cover all of the web text material, then I shall explicitly define what is not covered on the tests). Assessment of your mastery of this material will be by means of the mid-term exams; you will be not be allowed a "cheat sheet".
So lets start with an examination of the scope and purpose of this "Theory of Instrumentation & Measurements" component of the course. I aim to tie together some concepts from several disciplines (notably physics, electronics, statistics, engineering) so as to help you become a well-informed, confident user of environmental instruments. Perhaps the following schematic may be useful, as a representation of the Scope of an Environmental Measurement.
Of course, an emormous number of completely different types of instruments are used to probe the environment. For example, we can contrast simple in-situ sensors (such as a thermistor measuring temperature in a river) against far more complex remote-sensors (eg. satellite radiometers measuring atmospheric temperature profiles, or deriving windspeed from cloud motion, etc). Similarly, concentration of a trace gas in the atmosphere might be measured in-situ by an electromagnetic-absorption analyser (a rather simple instrument, understandable from elementary physics), or by bubbling air through some chemical solution (a simple procedure to the chemist), or perhaps by use of some quite complex instrument, like a mass spectrograph, or gas chromatograph, or flame ionisation detector.
Thus, it may be that my "Scope Diagram" seems to refer to environmental measurements of an entirely different style from "yours. " But lets take this as a context for discussion - our "Theory of Instrumentation & Measurements" component of the course will be built around this "scope diagram," and there is an overall unity of the topics within this scope.
Practicality: There is neither possibility nor point in studying each and every environmental variable, and every instrument (or even every class of instrument) to measure it. The approach in this course is to consider a small number of simple instruments in detail, from a fundamental level, so as to train you to take a critical approach to instruments.
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