• NCAR Annual Report
• CISL report
• EOL report
• ESSL report
• RAL report
• SERE report

Training in geoscientific tools

		Dennis Shea, an associate scientist in the Climate and Global Dynamics Division of NCAR's ESSL, co-presented an NCL workshop in December 2006 at the APEC Asian-Pacific Climate Center in Busan, Korea. The Director of this relatively new center invited NCAR trainers to help their researchers and some students from a nearby university become proficient using this tool. These workshops help scientists learn to quickly analyze and visualize their data using a single tool, and by the end of the course most students have created a fully functional program for processing their own datasets.

In FY2007, CISL hosted four training workshops for the NCAR Command Language (NCL): three were held locally at UCAR's Corporate Technical Training Center, and one took place at the APEC Asian-Pacific Climate Center in Busan, Korea. To support, enhance, and extend the capabilities of the university community both nationally and internationally, CISL submitted an internal proposal to offer one free yearly NCL workshop at qualifying UCAR member universities, starting in FY2008. We also plan to offer two to three local workshops, and we have been invited to present one at the Eurasia Institute of Earth Sciences in Istanbul, Turkey.

Research will be conducted to determine the feasibility of offering similar training courses for PyNGL and PyNIO. This would most likely involve a collaborative effort with experts from the University of Colorado who already offer a Python scientific training course.

It is important to note that our community contribution in this area is not simply training to use the NCL tool: it is fundamental training in the important practice of Earth System data analysis. This work advances NCAR's strategic goal to "Cultivate a scientifically literate and engaged citizenry and a diverse and creative workforce."

This series of training workshops is supported by NSF Core funds.