Spencer A. Hill Postdoc Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University

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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

MITGCM M.I.T. General Circulation Model
HYSPLIT Compute forward and backward air trajectories

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

Undergraduate scholarships

NOAA Hollings Scholarship Open to undergraduate sophomores; funding and NOAA internship
Barry Goldwater Scholarship For undergraduate juniors in sciences