Training in Geoscientific Tools

	Vani Cheruvu, an NCAR postdoc, receives advice on coding scientific visualizations from instructor Dennis Shea, an NCAR associate scientist, during the February 2006 NCL workshop. These workshops provide an in-depth level of user service that dramatically increases their productivity and ability to make effective use of the tools and facilites we provide.

Staff in CISL and ESSL have collaborated to provide a series of training workshops for NCL, a free, interpreted language designed specifically for geoscientific data analysis and visualization. These workshops went on hiatus in FY 2005 due to resource constraints, and they were revitalized in FY 2006 by popular demand from the users. A total of 28 local and non-local workshops have been offered since the year 2000, with 330 students in attendance. These free workshops are four days in length with morning lectures and hands-on afternoon labs. Students are encouraged to bring their own datasets to the class so that by the end of the workshop they have produced meaningful results from their data.

The NCL workshops support the NCAR strategic priorities of "Developing and providing advanced services and tools," and "Engaging a broader and more diverse community" in the atmospheric and geosciences. The courses are taught by a climate analysis expert who provides a unique, scientific perspective on learning NCL, with support from an NCL visualization expert. The hands-on labs provide an environment for one-on-one interactions with instructors and allow students to apply the course material to their own scientific analysis problems. Based on results from a visualization and analysis survey conducted in 2005, these workshops are highly regarded, and there is a strong desire in the user community to see them continued.

A goal in FY 2006 was to offer at least three NCL workshops, adding more if the demand was great enough. We offered a fourth local workshop, and one in Silver Spring, Maryland for a group of NOAA scientists, with NOAA financial support. Plans have been made to offer four more local NCL workshops in FY 2007, with the possibility of additional non-local classes if requested. Based on comments from the survey noted above, there was a high level of interest in online training, which is something we plan to investigate. A final goal for next year is to consider training possibilities for PyNGL and PyNIO, software components that provide Python interfaces to NCL's file input/output and visualization capabilities. Training for these interfaces would first require offering training courses in Python itself, which we believe is best left to an outside Python expert. A first step has already been taken in this direction, with CISL staff attending a Python course for the purpose of evaluating the class for usefulness within our scientific environment. The next step is to develop a plan for how to incorporate Python training with follow-up courses in PyNGL and PyNIO.

This project is supported by NSF core funding.