ASP Modelling Hub - Winter School 2022

It is with great pleasure that the ASP Future Projections Expert Group now invites expressions of interest for the 2022 ‘Winter School’ on numerical modelling, data analysis, and computational techniques for Earth and climate sciences. This two-day fully-catered workshop will run on Monday 5th and Tuesday 6th September, immediately after the ASP conference, and will take place on the Kelburn Campus of Victoria University of Wellington.

The workshop is open to all, but we anticipate that it will be most useful to postgraduate students wanting to learn essential computational research skills, or perhaps to staff wishing to update their expertise, diversify their skill-sets, or simply learn enough to be able to keep up with their students 😉

The Winter School will focus on the areas briefly outlined below, using a mix of informal lecture-style presentations and hands-on tutor-guided practical sessions:

Day 1 Morning: Introduction to programming languages and environments (Navigating the command line environment, scripting vs programming, pros & cons of various languages etc)

Introduction to CMIP GCMs and other numerical models (Climate model basics: components, types of models, internal variability. CMIP overview, climate sensitivity)

Afternoon: Analysis and plotting of timeseries data (Principal component / empirical orthogonal function analysis, calculation of correlations, anomalies, detrending etc)

Day 2 Morning: Getting started with supercomputing (Guest lecture from Alex Pletzer, NeSI, describing the NZ computer resources, how to access them, and how to run your code on them)

Analysis and plotting of spatial data (Understanding gridded data, map projections, data analysis and manipulations, masking, extracting vertical / horizontal sections)

Afternoon: Document preparation in LaTeX (Learn the basics, write equations, insert figures, create your own tables, insert references etc)

Work Structure & Version control (Defining a workflow, handling ‘big data’, version control for scripts/documents, best practice guidelines)

The aim of the Winter School is that, by the end of the two days, participants will be able to find and download (climate model) data of interest, use simple scripts to process, analyse, and plot those data, integrate those outputs into a typeset document, and use version control software to keep track of changes. We will use Python for the majority of the work but will incoporate examples from other languages if necessary.

There are 20 places available, on a first-come first-served basis. So if you’re interested (or have students not on this list) please just reply to me with a short email and we’ll add your name to the list.