23 May 1995 Praise From Afar For Lincoln Environmental Physics Course

Lincoln's reputation stretches far and wide ... from the city of Logan, in Utah, USA comes praise for the University's Environmental Physics course.

The executive editor of the newsletter for customers of Campbell Scientific Inc. the producers of the world's leading data logging and environmental measurement instrument systems, has written to the course examiner Dr Graeme Buchan applauding Lincoln's efforts in conducting an Environmental Physics course.

"There are only a handful of universities in this country (USA) teaching a top-notch similar course," he writes, and he invited Dr Buchan to contribute a newsletter article on his teaching experiences with Campbell Scientific dataloggers.

That article has duly appeared and it details the use of Campbell Scientific CR10 loggers, chosen for the Lincoln course "in view of their ease of use, versatility and cost."

Dr Buchan said the CR10 served as an excellent teaching tool, enabling the demonstration of numerous physics phenomena, as well as equipping students with highly marketable skills.

In the laboratory students learn logger programming and the interfacing and characteristics of sensors. Concepts include calibration, accuracy, resolution, nonlinearity, response time and measurement frequency. In field projects they monitor variables then analyze, plot and regress data with a spreadsheet. The menu of field projects includes soil temperature, air temperature and humidity, UV-B solar radiation, and windspeed profile.

The one-semester Environmental Physics course for year 2 students complements lectures covering atmospheric physics, meteorology and microclimate and exposes students to "real world" equipment and applications.

The CR10s are also used in graduate programmes at Lincoln.