I learned a lot about hydrology and climate modeling in this class. I wasn't sure what to expect of the professor due to the negative reviews, and because of the small class size (only 3 of us stayed in the class out of the 6 or so who came to class the first day). However, I came away from the quarter with a positive impression of Professor Lettenmaier, and although the workload was pretty high, I felt like I got a lot out of putting in extra effort.

The way the class was structured Winter quarter was that the students take turns leading class discussions. For three people, this meant that we were presenting every 3 class-days – but I heard that there are typically more people in the class which would lessen the workload significantly (as usually the professor assigns pairs of people to present instead of individuals). We took turns presenting on pretty dense papers about very interesting hydrological issues such as the effect of drought-produced dust on snowmelt rates, how wildfires impact stream runoff, atmospheric causes of California droughts/extreme precipitation periods, etc. It sounds overwhelming to lead an hour and 15 minute class, but Professor Lettenmaier essentially used our presentations as scaffolding for his own lecture: I felt that for every few sentences I said on the topic, he would speak for 3-7 minutes. This ends up making it so that you do not have to be the expert on your paper, you just have to clearly outline the key results, methods, and have somewhat of a grasp on how to interpret the scientific figures. His contributions were very informative and I liked the Socratic style of discussion where he was basically creating a conversation around the figures we pulled from the papers. I also liked this style because it was a pretty free-flowing discussion where I could ask him many questions as well.

Outside of these assignments we had a couple projects due which involved analyzing real data on droughts. These were challenging but he made a point to check in with us every class on our progress and was lenient with what we were able to accomplish given our lack of experience with R, for example.

Overall, he's pretty gruff and old-school but kind, and seems to be genuinely interested in teaching. He just doesn't do a lot of hand-holding, and expects that you do the work and put in effort. It's not the easiest class but the workload is manageable. I appreciated this class a lot more than I was expecting to, and it actually made me more excited about the scientific process and potentially studying climatology or something related in grad school in the future! Would recommend if you are genuinely interested in hydrology and in getting a taste of what hydrological scientists are doing/how they think in a smaller, more seminar-style class format.