Development of an Intermediate Computational Meteorology Course

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2019-01-01
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Thielen, Jonathan
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In this project, the core of a new intermediate-level course in computational meteorology has been developed. The current course offering at Iowa State, MTEOR 227, introduces concepts of computer programming through the use of Fortran and Python. This new course has been designed to follow MTEOR 227, and it covers more in-depth utilization of Python (and accompanying scientific packages) in academic, research, and forecasting settings, the use of Git (a version control system), collaboration on software development, and commonly-encountered operational problems. In particular, a course outline and two fully-developed modules have been produced and published online via GitHub. After consulting with experts in the field, the outline of topics was selected to provide students with the background they need for programming in advanced coursework, research, and operations. The materials for each module, which consist of informational documents for reference, interactive code notebooks for lectures, and assignments and projects for assessment, were created sequentially from the outline of topics. All these materials utilize freely-available software, so that anyone may use or adapt them. In this way, these new course materials will be able to benefit the education of those at Iowa State and in the broader meteorological community.

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