Downloading data and data manipulation
Summary
The purpose of this activity is to demonstrate the use of Matlab commands for opening and processing climate data. The climate data is retrieved from https://iri.columbia.edu as a netcdf file. The main objective is to gain an understanding of how matrices are organized and how to manipulate data, as well as how to create maps and graphs. The tasks involved in this activity include opening the netcdf file in Matlab, calculating the annual average, extracting specific months, creating maps or plots of the climate variable, and interpreting the results.
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Learning Goals
The goals of this activity is to recall the material and physical processes discussed in class. The students are reproducing the maps and graphs to then assess and explain the results using the physical processes learnt in class.
At the end of the activity student will be able tp:
- Access data online
- Select the specific data for the activity and download the netcdt file
- Apply basic statistic such as average computation
- Create maps and plots
- Critic and explain the results
This activity provides basic statistics knowledge via data analysis and processing. Students relate the results to material seen in class to explain why such features are observed in the created figures.
Context for Use
The course is intended for students at the second-year level of a Science Bachelor degree at University. The activity is designed for a group of 15 students as a face-to-face activity with a 4-hour duration. This activity corresponds to the lab component (2 hours per week) of a 3-credit course named Earth's climate. Students attending the course have no background in computer science.
This activity is taking place in a computer classroom to reinforce the theory part.
Students need to have knowledge of Earth's climate such as temperature, and precipitation distribution around the world.
The students would have learned to create vectors and matrices and the basic commands such as mean, sum etc.. in a former session called Matlab vocabulary.
Description and Teaching Materials
The activity consists of producing maps and graphs representing climate variables. Students will then interpret the map and explain what such a distribution is observed on the specific maps.
The climate variable data used in this activity is available at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society. https://iri.columbia.edu
The instructions for the practical are provided on an MLX file and as PDF file.
The goal of this activity is to improve the understanding of the physical processes presented in the Theory.
The MLX file attached corresponds to the document provided as a "lab manual". Students are also required to take their own notes.
student_lab_manual.mlx (MATLAB Live Script 1.4MB Oct24 23)
Teaching Notes and Tips
This activity is an in-class activity taking place in a computer lab. The list of tasks to achieve is display in the live script document. Students work at their pace in class and interact with each other and also have support and help from the lecturer. It is a four hours activity spread over 2 weeks (2hours per week).
Assessment
The purpose of this task is to generate maps similar to the one demonstrated in class. The objective is accomplished once the activity delivered via the live script is completed and running without any errors. Students will engage in conversations with their peers and the instructor to ensure that they can describe the figures and clarify the processes involved in specific features.
References and Resources
The climate variables are accessible for free on the following website https://iri.columbia.edu
The data is commonly used in climate analysis by the scientific community.
The LiveScript document named Student Lab Manual is provided
This teaching activity was created as a part of the Teaching Computation with MATLAB Workshop held in 2023 at Carleton College.