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Trace Gases: Stella II Mac and PC

Activity and Starting Point page by R.M. MacKay. Clark College, Physics and Meteorology.
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This material is replicated on a number of sites as part of the SERC Pedagogic Service Project
Initial Publication Date: August 9, 2006

Summary

This Stella model allows students to learn about chemical mass balance in the atmosphere and apply this to atmospheric chlorofluorocarbon (important for ozone depletion) and carbon dioxide (important for global warming) concentration changes.

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Learning Goals

  • Terms: atmospheric life-time, source emission strength, and equilibrium concentration.
  • Learn about chemical mass balance of the global atmosphere.
  • Understand the relationship between atmospheric life-time, source emission strength, and equilibrium concentration.
  • Apply this to CFC concentration changes before and after international policies calling for the phase out of CFC production.
  • Calibrate Model to 1958 to 2000 Mauna Loa CO2 observations and then use model to estimate future CO2 concentrations.

Context for Use

Can be used in an introductory geoscience class with content related to global warming, ozone depletion, or global scale atmospheric pollution.

Teaching Materials

Mac Version

Mac Version of Atmospheric Trace Gas Assignment ( 40kB May19 03) is a complete activity archive (*.sit) with Stella Model and MS word activity document.

PC Version

PC Version of Atmospheric Trace Gas Assignment ( 52kB Jun5 03) is a complete activity archive (*.zip) with Stella Model and MS word activity document. Right click and save it to your disk in *.zip format so it can be unzipped with WinZip. You will need WinZip to unzip these files. An evaluation copy of WinZip is available at WinZip.com .

Teaching Notes and Tips

Activity takes about 2 hours to complete. If you do not have Stella at your school you can download a free demo version of Stella from High Performance Systems, Inc.

Assessment

Teaching materials contain a student activity that can help promote and assess student learning.

References and Resources

An updated JAVA version of this activity is available here. It runs best on a PC but has run on Mac OS 10.2.4 with Mozilla browser.