This short-course covers basic tools to get started with Python in climate science. For example, this short course will briefly touch upon subjects, such as (i) packages mosted used by climate scientists, (ii) Python for beginners, and (iii) data extraction, basic analysis, and visualization. Specifically, participants will become familiar with datasets and learn how to manipulate geospatial and multidimensional data from commonly used reanalysis climate datasets. Additionally, we will also cover how to take advantage of the powerful, versatile and widely used package Xarray (https://xarray.dev/) to apply simple operations over multidimensional data in just a few lines of code! By the end of the course, participants will be able to compute and visualize anomalies and climatologies.
This short-course promotes open-source and collaborative environments for climate scientists. To accomplish this goal, this course will be conducted using Jupyter notebooks in Google Colab. Participants are recommended to open a google account prior to the course. We expect all participants to have some basic programming experience (including basic knowledge of coding concepts such as loops, conditional statements, functions and data types, among others), but no previous exposure with Python language is necessary. Attendees will be provided with an installation guide, as well as with complementary examples (i.e., notebooks) to illustrate how useful these tools can be for a climate scientist.
We highly encourage early career researchers and programming enthusiasts in climate and wider environmental sciences to attend this course.