October 5, 2001

Meteorology, Oceanography, Liberal Arts

By STANLEY Q. KIDDER, LEONARD J. PIETRAFESA, and PAUL J. CROFT

Science is an essential part of a liberal-arts education. At nearly every college and university, students can study the pure sciences of physics, chemistry, and biology, and usually one applied science: geology. Institutions of higher education should add to their curriculums two other applied sciences: meteorology, the science of the atmosphere, and oceanography, the science of the ocean.

What do meteorology and oceanography have to do with other disciplines in the liberal arts? Here