Impact Lab Data Science Events
The Environmental Futures & Big Data Impact Lab is a partnership of seven organisations, including the Met Office and the University of Exeter. The Impact Lab is part-funded by the European Regional Development Fund. It provides support to Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in South West England to help them make better use of big data tools and environmental data to grow their business. The Informatics Lab as part of the Met Office contributes Data Science and Weather and Climate expertise to Impact Lab projects and events.
One of the ways the Impact Lab helps SMEs to grow is by putting on events on particular topics, such as machine learning or utilising climate datasets, which may be pertinent to their business, but which they lack necessary expertise to start exploiting. These events can lead to SMEs approaching the Impact Lab with a project proposal to help them in a particular area.
In pre-pandemic times, these events would be held at the Exeter Science Park, where the Met Office and University of Exeter staff members of the Impact Lab are based, and would present an opportunity for networking. Remote working has changed the nature of these events, but also provided some advantages, such as the ease with which these events can be recorded for later viewing by those who could not attend the live presentation. In this blog post I will describe two of the recent virtual events that we have held. There are links to a recording of the event on YouTube and example code on GitHub. Information on upcoming events can found on the Impact Lab Eventbrite page.
Introduction to Python for Data Analysis
Following on from previous events which gave high level overviews of Machine Learning and Computer Vision, feedback from participants suggested that they were interest in applying techniques from these fields, but did know where to get started. In particular many said they had some programming experience, but not in python which is the most commonly used programming language in these fields, which presented a barrier to entry. This suggested we should put on an event which showed participants how to get started using python for data analysis.
The event assumes some basic programming knowledge and preferably some basic level python knowledge. The tutorial recaps the basic concepts of python and how one might handle data using basic python language features. It then covers use of more sophisticated data science tools available in Python, such as Pandas and Iris, to write more efficient and readable code for data handling, looking at concepts like metadata and tabular vs gridded data.
Recordings:
Example Code: https://github.com/informatics-lab/intro_python_data_analysis
Using Climate Data for Business Planning
Climate Change will affect many aspects of life in the coming century. Whereas climate research was viewed as primarily of scientific interest when the Met Office Hadley Centre was founded 30 years ago, it is now recognised that all organisations, including businesses big and small, need to factor the impacts of climate change and climate variability into their long term business planning. To consider climate impacts, SMEs need to know how and where to access public climate data sets and what tools they should use to extract and process data relevant to their business.
This tutorial gives a brief introduction to climate change and the different types of climate data sets, including observations and simulation output. We consider how changes to meteorological variable such as temperature translate into real-world impacts and what sort of planning questions might factor in the impact of climate change . We then show some examples of how to do basic analysis of climate change impact using the UK Climate Projections data set for use cases such as energy production or the cooling and heating requirements of buildings might change.
Example Code: https://github.com/informatics-lab/UsingClimateData
