The Atmospheric Physics research Group attended the 2016 West and Central African Research and Educational Network in Senegal in March 2016. The paper titled OAU-MetLink: An Online Resource for Teaching of Physical Meteorology in Nigerian Universities was presented. The Abstract is below:
Atmospheric processes largely can be described by the laws of physics and chemistry which are
demonstrated by well-tested heuristic models. This option is very attractive in the sense that
going by the categories of atmospheric motions, the large scale manifestations cannot be
encompassed and reproduced to scale in the laboratory. Also, the prohibitive costs and lack of
infrastructure required to set up a modern laboratory for research purposes make such to be a
daunting challenge for most of the Nigerian Universities to own and operate such facilities for
teaching and research purposes. The quest for laboratory demonstration for improved delivery in the teaching of topics in physical meteorology at the University-level such as, atmospheric thermodynamics, radiation and optics, cloud physics and air pollution, have brought to the fore demands for an online
platform, whereby students and teachers alike can remotely run simulations in an interactive
manner to gain better understanding of the physical phenomena occurring in the atmosphere.
The OAU-MetLink is a suite of online resources such as real time and archived databases
obtained from a world-class meteorological research station situated at Obafemi Awolowo
University (OAU), case studies on atmospheric phenomena, instructional videos on
meteorological instrumentations and Java Applets. Integrated is a meteorological data pre-processor from which indirect determination of atmospheric parameters such as, sensible heat
flux, friction velocity, Monin-Obukhov length, precipitable water content, clearness index,
stability indices, lifting condensation level (LCL), etc., can be obtained using routinely measured
variables like air temperature, insolation and wind speed.