Spencer A. Hill Postdoc Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University
Home | Publications CV | DIYnamics aospy | Resources About Me
Resources
This page comprises a loosely organized collection of resources I have found useful. Your mileage may vary.
Science communication
Figures
Principiae | Materials on effective figures (and slides and writing) |
Edward Tufte | Classic books on effective data displays |
Writing
The Elements of Style | "Omit needless words!" |
The Sense of Style | Excellent modern writing guide |
On Writing | Nominally about fiction but valuable for nonfiction also |
LaTeX
http://latexcolor.com/ | Copy-pasteable color definitions for LaTeX documents | |
A very minimal introduction to TikZ | Great entry into LaTeX plotting packages TikZ and PGF | |
Detexify | Draw a symbol, get the LaTeX command for it. | |
Beamer customization cheat sheet | Quick reference for how to tinker with elements of Beamer presentations |
Reproducible research via org-mode
Org-mode is an extension of the Emacs text editor for creating outline-like documents, with lots of functionality for embedding to-do lists, links, code, and images and for converting the files to LaTeX, HTML, and other formats.
This integration of elements typically found in scientific manuscripts makes Org-mode a potentially useful vehicle for reproducible research – checkout this page.
In fact, my website is written as a collection of org-mode files, published to HTML using org's publish functionality. Source code here.
Emacs for Mac OS X | Easily install GUI version of Emacs on Mac OS X/macOS |
exec-path-from-shell | Library for linking environment variables that Emacs sees with your system values. |
Python
I am an avid user of the Python programming language, which is modern, powerful, elegant, open-source, and well-documented. In addition to the aospy project, I also have a few other, less polished open-source Python packages that I have created as side projects; they are available on my Github.
Core packages I use
pangeo | Community platform for Big Data geoscience |
xarray | N-dimensional labeled arrays and datasets |
dask | Parallel computing and memory chunking |
matplotlib | For plotting |
cartopy | For plotting maps |
Python environments and package managers
conda | conda env create and conda install are your friend :) |
miniconda | Guide to setting up conda environments on HPC Clusters |
Jupyterlab | Web-based interactive python interface |
Research tools
Climate science & meteorology history
Geoff Vallis's collection of classic papers | With useful comments by G. Vallis |
Old Weather | Citizen-science project: transcribe historical ship logs of weather data |
Models
Climate data portals
Data visualization
nullschool.net | Beautiful, interactive visualization of meteorological and ocean data |
Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth | NASA portal to imagery of earth taken by astronauts |
Martin Jucker's 3D weather visualizations | Beautiful videos, interactive 3D plots, and static images of current and past weather |
Command line utilities
netCDF Operator (NCO) toolkit | Library of command-line tools for interacting with netCDF data |
tree command | recursive directory listing command; install on MacOS via homebrew |
colordiff | Colorize/prettify the diff command-line tool |
Career
Climate science podcasts (w/ discussion of career trajectories)
Deep Convection | Hosted by Adam Sobel |
Forecast | Hosted by Michael White, Nature's climate science editor |
Career advice books
These take a tough-love, no-nonsense approach that I find useful.
The Professer is In |
Good Work if You Can Get It |
Postdoctoral fellowships
Graduate school fellowships
Undergraduate scholarships
NOAA Hollings Scholarship | Open to undergraduate sophomores; funding and NOAA internship |
Barry Goldwater Scholarship | For undergraduate juniors in sciences |