OU Weather & Climate Club Wiki
Courses
Some great introductory courses shared by our members that you might find useful and fun 📖
📌 OpenLearn
The home of free learning from The Open University, there so many interesting courses - it’s a great place to start!
Some of the OpenLearn courses shared by our members include:
📌 University of Reading
The University of Reading is the UK’s leading meteorology department and offers 4 short free on-demand courses open to anyone. No existing knowledge or experience of meteorology required:
Explore some of the physical processes driving UK weather systems and get hands on in the world of weather with practical activities and fieldwork. Try your hand at forecasting and have a go at interpreting weather maps and compare your results with our educator, Dr Sylvia Knight’s. You’ll also watch our educators carrying out simple but effective experiments including creating clouds, simulating hot air rising and demonstrating the Coriolis effect
Investigate the impact of climate change, the research being done to tackle it, and what you can do to take meaningful action
Data assimilation has potential applications in a wide variety of fields. This course aims to provide an introduction to the basic concepts of data assimilation without assuming a background in mathematical concepts or any specialist subject knowledge
Climate and weather projections hold the data that businesses need both to evaluate the risk climate change poses and to mitigate that risk. However, interpreting this data can be challenging. On this two-week course, you’ll learn how to identify relevant and reliable climate data for your business and explore how that raw data can be converted into information that connects with the particular operational and financial decisions you face
In addition, there are 4 term-long scheduled online courses, with start dates in October, January and April. These are offered in
📌 National Centre for Atmospheric Science
Introductory, Practical and Modelling courses in atmospheric science: some are online and some are in-person at various centres around the UK. Educational discount or NCAS Subsidised rates for fees might be possible.
Courses include: Introduction to Atmospheric Science; Introduction to Scientific Computing; Data Analysis Tools; Introduction to Atmospheric Radar; Practical Aerosol Science; Introduction to UK Chemistry Aerosol model; Introduction to Unified Model; MPAS tutorials; Atmospheric Measurement & Modelling Summer School; Climate Modelling Summer School
You can subscribe to the NCAS Training mailing list
📌 Project Pythia: An Educational Hub for the Geoscientific Python community
Project Pythia is a home for Python-centered learning resources that are open-source, community-owned, geoscience-focused, and high-quality.
As well as their in-house Foundation Book of tutorials, Cookbooks, Data Repository and Youtube webinar playlists, Project Pythia curate a gallery for the discovery of other online courses
Working in collaboration with Project Pythia is Climatematch Academy which has made available the materials for its 2 week course on the Computational Tools for Climate Science.
📌 Harvard Center for the Environment
From the Harvard Center for the Environment, this is a course website giving a quantitative introduction to the science of climate change and its consequences, meant to assist students to process issues that often appear in the news and public debates.
There are slides, videos and coding exercises in Jupyter notebooks with module categories titled Basics, Atmosphere, Oceans, Cryosphere and Warming Consequences: