MSCAR Python Workshop

Motivation

This material will be used to provide an overview of how to use Python for the atmospheric and climate sciences.

Authors

Max Grover Zach Sherman Scott Collis Adam Theisen

Contributors

Workshop Recording

The recording for this workshop can be found here!

Structure

Radar Data with Py-ART

Within this section, we cover the basics of Py-ART and apply it to a sample analysis workflow.

Weather Observations with ACT

The Atmospheric data Community Toolkit (ACT) is a helpful tool when working with atmospheric observations! This portion will focus on reading, visualizing, and analyzing observational datasets from the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement user facility.

Climate Analysis with Pangeo

Our last section covers how to use the Pangeo stack, specifically Intake-ESM, Xarray, and other components to inspect and visualize earth system model data.

Running the Notebooks

You can either run the notebook using Binder or on your local machine.

Using on the Pangeo Binder (Recommended)

1. Make Sure You Have a Github Account

The first step is to make sure you have a Github Account.

Here is the link if you do have one already:

Github account creation link

2. Log into Pangeo Binder

Next, sign in and authenticate the Pangeo Binder, which is the platform we will use for the workshop:

Pangeo Binder Link

The JupyterHub instance we use for this course is relatively small in memory and compute power (~10 GB of memory, 2 CPU cores). For more information about all of the open computational resrouces available within the Pangeo community, check out the Pangeo Cloud documentation.

3. Launch our Environment

Now that we have our authentication set up, we can access our content!

Use the following link to launch into the binder:

Binder Link

If you are having issues with that (ex. it is taking a long time), try using the following link:

https://hub.aws-uswest2-binder.pangeo.io/user/{your_github_username}/lab

Where you replace {your_github_username} with your github username (ex. mgrover1)

General Binder Advice

The simplest way to interact with a Jupyter Notebook is through Binder, which enables the execution of a Jupyter Book in the cloud. The details of how this works are not important for now. All you need to know is how to launch a Pythia Cookbooks chapter via Binder. Simply navigate your mouse to the top right corner of the book chapter you are viewing and click on the rocket ship icon, (see figure below), and be sure to select “launch Binder”. After a moment you should be presented with a notebook that you can interact with. I.e. you’ll be able to execute and even change the example programs. You’ll see that the code cells have no output at first, until you execute them by pressing Shift+Enter. Complete details on how to interact with a live Jupyter notebook are described in Getting Started with Jupyter.

Running on Your Own Computer

If you are interested in running this material locally on your computer, you will need to follow this workflow:

Clone the https://github.com/mgrover1/mscar-python-workshop-2022 repository:
```
 git clone https://github.com/mgrover1/mscar-python-workshop-2022.git
```
Move into the mscar-python-workshop-2022 directory
```
cd mscar-python-workshop-2022
```

Create and activate your conda environment from the environment.yml file

conda env create -f environment.yml
conda activate mscar-python-tutorial-dev

Move into the notebooks directory and start up Jupyterlab
```
cd notebooks/
jupyter lab
```