-The materials contain everything required to run a one-day workshop. This includes data files, software installation instructions and lesson plans (complete with exercises and solutions), which double as teaching notes for instructors and a reference for learners to refer back to. For those unable to attend a workshop, it is also possible work through the lessons independently. The skills covered in the lessons are presented in the context of a typical data analysis task: creating a command line program that plots the average rainfall for any given month, so that the output from two different global climate models can be compared visually. After giving an overview of the PyAOS stack (i.e. the ecosystem of libraries used in the atmosphere and ocean sciences) and the management of software environments using conda, the lessons introduce the basic Python commands required to create the plot. Those commands are then refactored to be more modular/reusable (using functions) before being transferred to a stand-alone script that can be executed from the command line. Changes to that script are then tracked using version control as further edits are made to implement common defensive programming strategies and to record the provenance of the input data files and output figures. Along the way, the basics of the Network Common Data Form (netCDF) file format and associated “climate and forecasting” metadata convention are introduced. The raster (or “gridded”) output from weather, climate and/or ocean models is almost universally archived using this format.
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