Spencer A. Hill Assistant Professor Dept. of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, City College of New York
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Resources
This page comprises a loosely organized collection of resources I have found useful. Your mileage may vary.
Science communication
Figures
| Principiae | Materials on effective figures (and slides and writing) |
| Edward Tufte | Classic books on effective data displays |
Writing
| 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 (yes, that Stephen King) | Classic. Nominally about fiction but invaluable to science writing |
| A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, George Saunders | Ditto. Just replace "art/writer/story" etc. with "science/scientist/article" etc. and it all holds |
LaTeX
| http://latexcolor.com/ | Copy-pasteable color definitions for LaTeX documents | |
| A very minimal introduction to TikZ | Great entry into LaTeX plotting packages TikZ and PGF | |
| Detexify | Draw a symbol, get the LaTeX command for it. | |
| Beamer customization cheat sheet | Quick reference for how to tinker with elements of Beamer presentations |
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.
In fact, my website is written as a collection of org-mode files, published to HTML using org's publish functionality. Source code here. (Though since I created it while a graduate student, other tools for making good academic websites have improved a lot, and I'm not 100% sure I'd recommend doing it this way these days!)
Some useful Emacs-related things:
| Emacs for Mac OS X | Easily install GUI version of Emacs on Mac OS X/macOS |
| exec-path-from-shell | Library for linking environment variables that Emacs sees with your system values. |
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
| 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
| 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
| 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
Climate data portals
Data visualization
| 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, interactive 3D plots, and static images of current and past weather |
Command line utilities
| netCDF Operator (NCO) toolkit | Library of command-line tools for interacting with netCDF data |
| tree command | recursive directory listing command; install on MacOS via homebrew |
| colordiff | Colorize/prettify the diff command-line tool |
Career
Climate science podcasts (w/ discussion of career trajectories)
| 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.
| The Professor is In, Karen Kelsky |
| Good Work if You Can Get It, Jason Brennan |
Postdoctoral fellowships
Graduate school fellowships
Undergraduate scholarships, national
| CCNY list of national scholarships | List of 20+ national scholarship programs open to undergraduates |
| NOAA Jose E. Serrano EPP/MSI scholarship | For underrepresented minorities; funding and NOAA internship |
| NOAA Hollings Scholarship | Open to undergraduate sophomores; funding and NOAA internship |
| Barry Goldwater Scholarship | For undergraduate juniors in sciences |
CCNY funding
| City College Fellowship | For sophomores and juniors seeking to pursue a PhD |