Resources

This page comprises a loosely organized collection of resources I have found useful. Your mileage may vary.

Science communication

Figures

Link Notes
Principiae Materials on effective figures (and slides and writing)
Edward Tufte Classic books on effective data displays

Writing

Link Notes
The Elements of Style, Strunk and White The starting place. “Omit needless words!”
The Sense of Style, Steven Pinker Excellent modern writing guide
Writing Science, Joshua Schimel Excellent science-specific writing guide
On Writing, Stephen King Classic. Nominally about fiction but invaluable to science writing
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, George Saunders Ditto. Replace “art/writer/story” etc. with “science/scientist/article”

LaTeX

Link Notes
http://latexcolor.com/ Copy-pasteable color definitions for LaTeX documents
A very minimal introduction to TikZ Great entry into TikZ and PGF
Detexify Draw a symbol, get the LaTeX command for it
Beamer customization cheat sheet Quick reference for tweaking Beamer

Emacs and 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.

The previous version of this website was written as a collection of org-mode files, published to HTML using org’s publish functionality. I have since migrated to Quarto; see the repo for details.

Link Notes
Emacs for Mac OS X Easily install GUI version of Emacs on Mac OS X/macOS
exec-path-from-shell Link environment variables from shell into Emacs

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

Link Notes
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

Link Notes
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

Link Notes
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

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

Climate data portals

Data visualization

Link Notes
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 and plots of current and past weather

Command line utilities

Link Notes
netCDF Operator (NCO) toolkit Library of command-line tools for netCDF data
tree command Recursive directory listing
colordiff Colorize the diff command-line tool

Career

Climate science podcasts (with discussion of career trajectories)

Link Notes
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.

Postdoctoral fellowships

Graduate school fellowships

Undergraduate scholarships, national

Link Notes
CCNY list of national scholarships List of 20+ national scholarship programs
NOAA Jose E. Serrano EPP/MSI scholarship For underrepresented minorities; funding and NOAA internship
NOAA Hollings Scholarship For undergraduate sophomores; funding and NOAA internship
Barry Goldwater Scholarship For undergraduate juniors in sciences

CCNY funding

Link Notes
City College Fellowship For sophomores and juniors seeking to pursue a PhD