Why go to Australia?¶
In October 2024, I received a calendar invite “Tassie”, a 4 PM meeting on a random Thursday. I didn’t ask any questions before accepting the invite, and eagerly hopped on the call. During that virtual meeting, I met Clare Murphy, who mentioned she was leading a student workshop focused on Cape Grim/CAPE-k, the location of the U.S. Department of Energy Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) user facility mobile deployments. ARM deploys these climate research stations all over the world, you can find more information below:
ARM User Facility Capabilities
What is the Student Workshop? Has this been done before?¶
Scott (my supervisor) and I lead ARM’s workforce development efforts, planning hackathon-style events focused on building a strong open-science community. We train attendees on both the science and the related tools required to work with the data, while also encouraging collaboration using tools within the open-science ecosystem such as Jupyter, Python, and Github. We published a meeting summary from our first multiday event, the 2024 ARM Open Science Summer School in Cleveland, Ohio.
Through that intial event, we developed a framework for making these training events more reproducible! The other critical piece of technology/resource that made this event more reproducible was the hackathon template I worked on with the Hack-the-Hackathon community. At the 2024 Hack-the-Hackathon event in La Jolla, California, I worked with a small group on developing a template for hackathons/workshops. By entering a few commands into the terminal, one can spin up a fully functioning Github repository with a landing page, planning checklist, a default environment, notebook templates, etc.
The CAPE-k student workshop will include a site visit to the CAPE-k field site/Cape Grim. This was an event that was not possible to do in Cleveland last year, so we look forward to offering students hands-on experience in the field! Seeing the instruments “out in the wild” will provide the chance to physically see how the data are collected and dig into the “how” we collect measurements.
Travelling to Tasmania¶
There are not any direct flights from Chicago, Illinois to Stanley, Tasmania, Australia unfortunately! Our route is as follows
Chicago O’Hare (ORD) --> Los Angeles (LAX) --> Melbourne (MEL) --> Devonport (DPO)
There are layovers at both LAX and MEL, bringing the total travel time to ~30 hours!
Excitement for the Week¶
I am thrilled to kickoff this event and explore Tasmania/Australia. This is my first time visiting this part of the world, and there will be plenty of down-time. This evening, once landing in Devonport, we checked into the hotel and found a local seafood joint for dinner. Primms Seafood was delicious! I ordered the