For this session, I strongly recommend installing the Anaconda Python Distribution, which is available for Windows, Mac and Linux and ships all the main Python scientific libraries.
You can refer to https://github.com/nicolasfauchereau/Auckland_Python_Workshop#the-anaconda-python-distribution for more details about installing Anaconda and some additional libraries (e.g. xarray) on your machine.
For Windows users, a nice ressource (highly recommended reading also for those on Macs) is https://www.dataquest.io/blog/pydata-windows/.
The material will consist in Jupyter notebooks, which, in a nutshell, is an interactive development environment running in your browser and allowing to create executable documents mixing code, rich text comments, figures, etc. These can be found in the notebooks directory of the present github repo, at https://github.com/nicolasfauchereau/ACRE_workshop/tree/master/notebooks. If you don't want to install anything and / or run the notebooks, you can follow along by just clicking on the notebooks links on github, they will be rendered in HTML by github.:
- https://github.com/nicolasfauchereau/ACRE_workshop/blob/master/notebooks/climate_indices.ipynb is devoted to reading and constructing climate indices from climate fields.
- https://github.com/nicolasfauchereau/ACRE_workshop/blob/master/notebooks/weather_regimes.ipynb will show how to derive so called 'weather regimes' or 'synoptic types' from a reanalysis dataset over a regional domain. A good ressource on weather regimes is Michelangeli et al, 1995
To download an archive (zip) of the material, click on the green button (Clone or Download) on the right-hand side of https://github.com/nicolasfauchereau/ACRE_workshop and choose Download ZIP.
To run the examples you will need to download and unzip 2 archives, containing respectively the monthly SSTs for the tropical Pacific region, from the ERSST V5 dataset, and the daily NCEP / NCAR (aka NCEP1) 1000 hPa geopotential fields for a region encompassing New Zealand.
They are available at:
-
ftp://ftp.niwa.co.nz/incoming/fauchereaun/SST.zip
-
ftp://ftp.niwa.co.nz/incoming/fauchereaun/NZ.zip