Introduction to ESMValTool

Do you want to attend the workshop?

The Earth System Model Evaluation Tool (ESMValTool) is a tool for working with large climate datasets such as CMIP6 and ERA5. It started out as a collection of community-developed diagnostics and performance metrics (written in Python, R, Julia, and NCL) for the evaluation of Earth System Models. Recently, it has also turned out to be useful for other users of climate data, such as hydrologists and climate change impact researchers. It is built on top of ESMValCore, a Python package that can:

Both software packages have been developed by and for researchers working with climate data, with the support of several research software engineers.

This workshop is organized by the Netherlands eScience Center, a core contributor to the development of the ESMValCore and ESMValTool software. We will make use of the ESMValTool Tutorial. After this workshop, participants will:

Prerequisites

Participants must have access to a computer with Linux or Mac OS and at least 10 GB of free disk space. The Windows operating system is only supported if Linux is available through WSL2 (please install this before the workshop). If no suitable computer is available, users may be eligible for an account on the Geospatial Computing Platform of CRIB.

Some experience with running command line tools on Linux or Mac OS is required, as well as some experience with programming in one of the supported programming languages: Python, R, Julia, or NCL. An introduction to the Unix command line is available here.

The ESMValTool community makes use of git and GitHub for collaborating on software, therefore it is useful, but not necessary, to have a basic understanding of these tools. An introductory course is available here. Because the ESMValCore software is written in Python, it is advantageous, but by no means necessary, to have some experience with programming in Python.

Date

17 April 2023 (One-day training)

Venue

ITC Building, Room 2-133
Hengelosestraat 99, 7514 AE Enschede

Registration

The workshop is open to UT staff and students. Priority will be given to ITC staff and students.

The capacity is limited to 25 people.

Please fill-in the registration form to express your interest to attend the training workshop.

Registration confirmation will be send to the participants on 12 April.

Certificate

Certificate of participation will be provided on request after the training.

Instructors

Dr. Fakhereh (Sarah) Alidoost
Research Software Engineer, Netherlands eScience Centre

Sarah is a researcher/analyst in Geomatics and Remote Sensing. Her research interest is the use of earth observation data and geostatistics to describe the interaction between weather, land and water.

She completed her PhD in geostatistics and copulas, a relatively new area for integrating weather and land information (Departments of Earth observation science, and Water resource science, the faculty of ITC, University of Twente, the Netherlands).

Sarah has particular skills in programming, system analysis, image/data processing and management. She is interested in geo/statistical methods, fusion techniques, optimization and simulation methods.

Dr. Pranav Chandramouli
Research Software Engineer, Netherlands eScience Centre

Pranav has a PhD in the field of applied mathematics from National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology (INRIA) and the University of Rennes 1 in France. During his PhD, he developed the 4DVar suite of models focused on performing 4D variational data assimilation for turbulent fluid flows. This was followed by a postdoc at INRIA on stochastic turbulence model development for oceanic codes. In 2020, he moved to the Netherlands for a postdoc at TU Delft on offshore wind energy following which he joined the Netherlands eScience Center in March, 2022.

At the eScience Center, Pranav works in the Environment and Sustainability section on projects related to earth observation, data visualization and statistical analysis amongst other topics. He is also interested in the fields of quantum computing, artificial intelligence, GPUs and high performance computing.  He enjoys travel, gaming, and a good book to read.

Bouwe Andela, MSc
Research Software Engineer, Netherlands eScience Centre

Bouwe works in the Environment and Sustainability section on projects related to climate data analysis. For the past five years, he has been one of the core developers of ESMValTool, a community tool for analyzing large climate datasets that has seen considerable growth in popularity under his technical guidance.

Before joining the Netherlands eScience Center, he worked in the space industry, where he developed software for processing image data acquired by the Sentinel 5P and Sentinel 3 earth observation satellites for KNMI and ESA. Apart from ensuring that the software worked as expected on time, he also implemented improvements to the algorithms used in the data processors, increasing the accuracy and dramatically reducing the processing time.

Bouwe studied at the of University of Amsterdam where he obtained a bachelor’s in Physics, and a master’s in Astronomy and Theoretical Physics.

Tentative Schedule

9:30 - 10:00

Welcome and icebreaker

10:00 - 10:30

Introduction to ESMValTool

10:30 - 12:00

ESMValTool tutorial (Part 1)

12:00 - 13:00

Lunch break

13:00 - 14:30

ESMValTool tutorial (Part 2)

14:30 - 15:00

Coffee break

15:00 - 16:00

Tailor recipes/configuration to use cases

16:00

END

There will be ample opportunities for networking with the other participants and instructors during the breaks.

This event is supported by the Netherlands eScience Center Fellowship Grant NSESC.ESCF.2022.013.

For more information or questions, please contact dr. ing. Serkan Girgin (s.girgin@utwente.nl).