[Southeast-US] projects? "GIS Tutorial for Atmospheric Sciences"

Tom Roche Tom_Roche at pobox.com
Wed May 6 14:22:12 PDT 2015


I'm not sure how OSGeo or this subgroup manages its to-do list, so I just thought I'd put this out as an example of possibly something deserving of our focus, if only due to the "local angle." FWIW

* I study GIS, scientific computing, and atmospheric science pursuant to regional-scale modeling of GHGs and their sources/sinks, hence am on maillists that distribute items like the following.

* Jennifer Boehnert is the GIS Coordinator for the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), which is part of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), which is very much "our tax dollars at work."

Jennifer Boehnert Tue, 5 May 2015 13:03:47 -0600
> NCAR and UNC Asheville have developed a set of introductory GIS exercises that are focused on the atmospheric sciences.

Note also that the first exercise has a video from Tim Mulrooney of NCCU, so there seems to be an NC angle here. (Asheville is home to the National Climatic Data Center, which is probably how UNC-A got involved.)

> GIS is taught in just about every university and community college these days, but very few GIS courses or workshops are offered within the weather and climate domain. That is partly due to the lack of resources to teach such integrated content. To explore this resource visit http://gis.ucar.edu/projects/course-introduction-gis and download these materials for free.

Those materials may be "free," but

http://gis.ucar.edu/projects/course-introduction-gis
> REQUIRED SOFTWARE : ArcGIS 10.0 or higher

and, though they don't say it directly, the required OS is ... you guessed ...

> Once you download and unzip the exercise material it is suggested that you copy it to your C:\.  All exercises will reference the location of the maps and data at c:\Exercise1.

Kinda like going to your local food bank and being given "free" canned food requiring a 1-k$ can opener :-) Ordinarily I'd insert a sermonette on

* financial stress on higher education and its students
* the need for open science and reproducible research, esp in policy-relevant domains like Earth-system science

... but I'm guessing folks on this list have already drunk that kool-aid. So I'm not sure if this is an example of the sort of thing OSGeo does, or that this particular chapter could do, but I'd very much like to see *someone* start to reverse-engineer these types of tutorials using open-source GIS.

Is anyone already working on this sort of thing? Or at least tracking these sort of targets?

</rant> FWIW, Tom Roche <Tom_Roche at pobox.com>


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