Notes from 4/17 Millersville, PA Workshop

[jrleeman]

A place to collect notes for ourselves about improving the workshop materials.

Checkoff as we break these out into new issues - this is just a braindump!

Day 1

• [x] Introduce website and write URL up in classroom everyday.

Git

• [x] Add git (Windows) install notes
• [x] Explain what a repo is before we create one - and what should be a repo
• [x] Have editors with good syntax highlighting or no highlighting
• [x] Use same editor as is available - probably not vi
• [x] Add promise of making graphics before the end of the day to encourage getting through the hard start with git (start with setting up Python?)
• [x] Add git pretty log
• [x] bug calc.py initially so you can debug it later
• [x] Maybe use plain text initially since they don't know python yet?
• [x] Maybe explain workflow with graphics first?
• [x] Magazine rack analogy

Conda

• [x] Remove URL version of channel from environment.yml, just use conda-forge
• [x] Make sure your local unidata-workshop environment doesn't exist before starting to teach!

Notebooks

• [x] Rewrite our notebook intros to be more presentation quality
• [x] Can then include metpy/siphon as examples
• [x] Tab completion

Primer

• [x] Pre-clear notebook outputs
• [x] Question folks as to what the output should be before running it
• [x] Maybe do this all in interactive shell?
• [x] Point out that MATLAB is 1-based (and maybe why zero based is a thing?)
• [x] Add units to speed example
• [x] Pressure typo in exercises
• [x] Use MetPy constants
• [x] Talk about default values
• [x] Kelvin issue in example
• [x] Add tests for examples
• [x] Add np.ndim
• [x] Need a break before getting deep into time series stuff
• [x] Add boolean arrays back
• [x] Ran long

Timeseries

• [x] Clarify subsetting exercise
• [x] Missing links and resources
• [x] About 40 minutes over (Ryan: WORSE.)
• [x] Temperature_height_above_ground is all NaN

Upper Air

• [x] Use from metpy.io import get_upper_air_data instead
• [x] Clarify: use MetPy to download data
• [x] Might want to solve gotcha:

  get_upper_air_data(datetime(2017, 4, 5, 21), 'OUN')

  to

  my_date = datetime(2017, 4, 5, 21)
  get_upper_air_data(my_date, 'OUN')

• [x] Handle cases where there is no LFC
• [x] Confusion alternating between filled-out code/plots and ones learners write themselves
• [x] Add from metpy.units import units to last cell
• [x] Was Hodograph really masking?

Day 2

• [x] Put instructions for starting up again on the board
• [x] Asked to post our completed example notebooks

Surface Data

• [x] Weird failing for some lat/lon searches
• [x] Pre-sort date data
• [x] Ashville 35 C points that were unrealistic (good boolean filter)
• [x] Why does filling the states result in funky polygons? (fills better with lakes) Just use lakes one to solve this.
• [x] Why does the geo data look so bad from national earth? Rivers are especially bad.
• [x] Request upper air data plots with dewpoint depression
• [x] Plot of missing data currently shows an "X" which is obscuration. Should have an M

Satellite Data

• [x] Maybe RGB example they can do?

Models

• [x] Clean up some more oddities in end of example (no need to work with units)
• [x] Rename Cartopy_mepty_hrrr to something better

Command Line

• [x] People seemed engaged (this is good)
• [x] Fix bugs?
  • Plot format
  • Set gfs level to int
• [x] Try to simplify a bit more? Or at least have a simpler version with fewer bells and whistles to explain?

Other

• [x] Test on 3.6 w/ Appveyor.
• [x] Make basic numpy/matplotlib homework so we have more room for MetPy calc & units primer
• [x] Maybe whack git so we have more time??
• [x] Etherpad?
• [x] Reformat
  • Have reference, filled notebook
  • Have separate exercise notebook, blank with only imports, markdown description cells, and comments in answer cells
  • Teach from blank notebook
• [x] Add index notebook for workshop schedule

[jrleeman]

All broken up into new issues!