Objectives

This course prepares students to learn, develop, and refine best practices in geoscience-centric data analysis and visualzation using free- and open-source software written in Python.

Students will develop interactive, shareable software using what is often termed the Python Geoscience Software Ecosystem (PGSE), a continuously evolving set of Python software libraries with particular application to atmospheric and climate science-related data access, analysis, and visualization tasks.

Additionally, students will learn and practice version control using Git and GitHub.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of the class, students will have accomplished the following:

  1. Accessed, analyzed and visualized geoscience datasets using the PGSE demonstrated in class and with online resources such as https://projectpythia.org/

  2. Minimized the need to download copies of datasets from remote servers in favor of using PGSE client-access methods

  3. Developed publication/presentation-ready visualizations, both static and interactive

  4. Learned software-debugging strategies via the use of online resources such as StackOverflow

  5. Contributed example workflows and notebooks to Project Pythia’s Cookbook Gallery

  6. Graduate students only: Created a public repository on GitHub containing code, figures, and documentation of a short but data-intensive research study that could be accessed and reproduced by the community at-large