I am processing my thesis outline feedback and I think one of the most important things I can do is rewrite my framing and focus questions because these questions should convey the hourglass shape and lead into a clear situated context.
How did atmospheric science develop and how has its technology and observations shaped our understanding of the world around us?
I want my framing question to encompasses many aspects, but especially the historical component. It must be broad enough to cover both meteorology and climatology as well as the ways to study these including technology, instrumentation, observations, models, and the scale of all of these. I may want to expand this to the history of Earth System Sciences, but this might be way too expansive!
Zooming into the hourglass, I am specifically interested in clouds so I want to know a number of thing, most of them background.
- How did the study of clouds develop?
- How do we study clouds?
- Who studies clouds?
- Why do they study clouds?
These two questions are sub-questions of a focus question that I am having difficulty wording properly. It goes something like this though…
How does cloud research diverge from or build off (in theory and in practice) of historic cloud observations?
and then this leads into a couple very specific research questions…
- How successful is an automatic cloud classifier versus human observations of both cloud fraction and cloud type?
- How do cloud researchers collaborate across organizations and specialties and how does this inform the study of cloud research?