Hello World!
My name is Alex, and I’m an atmospheric science graduate student at the University of Utah. This blog is a place where I can share the various programs and algorithms that I use in my research. It’s hard for a new person starting out to become familiar with the tools that we use as earth scientists, so I want to document my learning curve in hopes that others can follow (and share ideas with me in return!). I have been wanting to make this blog for a while, so I have several ideas for posts in my head. For the first while I’ll be writing down what I’ve learned thus far, and then posts will become irregular as I continue to learn about the systems that have been built up over the last 70 years.
I primarily code in the Python programming language. I took a computer science minor in undergrad, and for that I learned Java and C#. While those may be great languages for writing apps, they don’t have the flexibility and library support data-intensive science requires. In my undergraduate atmospheric science classes, we mainly used MATLAB. Because I enjoy stoking Holy Wars (only halfway sarcastic), I’ll devote an entire post to why I don’t use MATLAB later. But since Python is my language of choice, the majority of these posts will be focused on the Python ecosystem.
Much has been said about Python’s prowess at data science. It and R are the two major languages in that field. But that’s not going to stop me from saying it again! Most of the information out there comes from the perspective of data that you would typically see in a high school statistics textbook (Here’s a list of heights of boys and girls in the class, compute the mean, median, and mode and such). While this 1D data is certainly interesting, it’s not what I see regularly. I’ve always found it difficult to translate skills from one dimension to n dimensions, so I will be taking an n-dimensional approach from the beginning.
My plan is to start from the very beginning of a person’s entry into data analysis, since I remember how lost I was when I first started. I first began getting interested in using computer programming as a tool two years ago, so we have a lot to catch up on.
Yet Another Weather Blog 