Information Technology Skills for Meteorology

2012-05-07 08:17:49: All students taking METR 5330 or METR 4330 for credit during the Spring 2012 semester, please have your work completed by 11:59pm Sunday 13 May.

2012-03-04: The end is near for this version of the course. A completely revised course will appear by the end of summer of 2012. Revisions are already happening and noted below.

2011-08-24: If you are enrolled, but do not have an account yet, please send me the information I need to grant you an account, as described in item 13 in Credit.

2011-05-19: On Gentry, python version 2.6.5 has been installed as python26. The older version 2.4.3 is available at python24 or python.

All users with accounts on Gentry should be aware of the six month rule for changing a password on an OU computer...

The icon indicates a task has been defined within. I recommend doing the first five tasks in order. BTW, those tasks have been upgraded and clarified for Spring 2010. After the first five tasks, I have no general advice about which tasks to prefer.

Doing this for credit For those enrolled, or seeking enrollment, at OU in METR 4330 or METR 5330.
Is your computer ready? You will need to be able to connect to Gentry or an equivalent webserver. You may want to do most of the computing on a PC.
Tips Links to a few tip pages here. (These tip pages are also referenced as needed within the tasks).
Basic HTML For those doing this for credit, and needing a password-protected webpage.
Python Introduction How to get started with Python. The task demonstrates reading and analyzing "flat files" from the mesonet.
Revised in 2012 Raster Graphics A task is offered for plotting radar data.
Revised in 2012 Vector Graphics Using Python to write SVG files. Again the task is plotting radar data.
Revised in 2012 numpy Fast array computations for Python number crunching, with Level II data from a netCDF file. Python Imaging Library to ouput directly to PNG format.
New in 2012 Dynamic Web Pages Python, CGI and Javascript for displaying images from an archive.
deprecated String Methods and Regular Expressions Automated reformatting of NWS products, with simple CGI.
NetCDF Using and storing data in the common file format (for meteorology) NetCDF. You will need to know the array syntax of numpy/Numeric before doing this.
Statistical Analysis with Python Elementary statistical analysis, emphasizing data preparation and plotting. Uses numpy/Numeric .
CGI with Forms More compilcated CGI, and also plotting with MatPlotLib.
GemPak, with CGI and/or crontab
GrADS

The old page may have some useful legacy tasks.

Revision Plans:

next up: IDV