Welcome to the GEOS 250, Computer Applications in the Geosciences, webpage for the Fall 2016 semester.
Above: Photo of the Oak Ridge National Labs Titan Supercomputer. Read more about it here.
Course Syllabus
Mon., 22 Aug., Course introduction. Overview of types of computers, hardware components, operating systems, and applications. Computing in the Geosciences.
Mon., 29 Aug., Introduction to IDL. Interactive Development Environment. Journaling. Variables: integers, floating point numbers, and strings. Basic math operations.
Mon., 05 Sep., Labor day. No class.
Mon., 12 Sep., Introduction to creating and using arrays in IDL. Example: pressure as a function of altitude and the barometric formula.
Mon., 19 Sep., Tour of the Butte Hall computing facility. Then, First IDL computer program.
Mon., 26 Sep., IDL computer program to plot P versus z, rho versus z, and read
US Standard Atmosphere ASCII data file.
Mon., 03 Oct., Drawing lines and placing text labels on plots. Download and read a radiosonde sounding from an ASCII data file.
Mon., 10 Oct., Review arrays. Then, implicit and explicit loops in IDL. For loops. Calculate lapse rate as function of altitude.
Mon., 17 Oct., Review concept of gradients. Then, where function. Finding unstable layers in sounding.
Mon., 24 Oct., Passing variables, functions, if-then-else structures, bubble sort program.
Mon., 31 Oct., Two-dimensional arrays. Image and colorbar functions. Moments, mean.
Mon., 07 Nov., linear Pearson correlation coefficient; linear fit; and variance spectra using fast Fourier transform (FFT).
Mon., 14 Nov., linear interpolation; smoothing; legends
Mon., 28 Nov., Example of IDL program: refraction of laser radiation in atmosphere. Then, error bars, multiple axes
Mon., 05 Dec., In class work on Final Projects.
Week of 12 - 16 Dec., Presentations of Final Projects.
Sat., 17 Dec., IDL license expires. All work must be complete and submitted.
Dr. Mayor's page
CSU Chico Atmospheric Lidar Research Group
This page updated 1/31/2012.