Summary of final project

The final project for the class is to use the tools we have developed regarding data analysis, data visualization and inferential thinking to gain insight from an Earth science data set. The data you choose to investigate is open and the question you choose to ask is open. The goal of your approach should be to analyze data in a way that gives insight into a phenomenon associated with Earth science.

Requirements for the project that should all be contained within a Jupyter notebook:

• Pose a question and have an introductory markdown text cell that describes the problem, describes the ways you are going to approach the problem and describes the data you are going to use to do so. This text should include references.
• Use at least three different types of data visualizations plots that are ones we used throughout the course.
• Use at two different data analysis methods/approaches that you utilized in the course.
• Conclude with a substantive markdown text cell that contains at least of page of text and describes the results of your analysis.
• Have a final acknowledgements section and a works cited section.

As your submission, upload a zipped directory that contains:

• a polished Jupyter notebook that contains your data analysis, visualizations and explanatory text.
• the underlying data sets you used in your analysis
• exported PDF of the Jupyter notebook
• each person is required to upload one submission. If it is a collaborative project, please note that and inclue names of the group mebers, limted to a maximum of three members.

Choice of problems and data

The choice of problems and data that you apply are open --- you get to choose your own adventure. However, it is absolutely essential that you cite the source of the data and discuss/cite any resource, place, or person that you got ideas from. It is perfectly reasonable to get ideas and inspiration from other sources. When you do, you need to be fully transparent about where such ideas came from with acknowledgements and citations as appropriate.

Some places to go for Earth Science data:

• UNAVCO data that geodetic scientists use for quantifying the motions of rock, ice and water that are monitored by a variety of sensor types at or near the Earth's surface https://www.unavco.org/data/data.html

• https://www.unavco.org/instrumentation/networks/networks.html Data by network/station

• https://www.unavco.org/data/gps-gnss/gps-gnss.html GPS data

• National Center for Environmental Information: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data-access

• including:

  • Climate Data Records
  • Climate Monitoring
  • Coastal Indicators
  • Geomagnetism
  • Gulf of Mexico
  • Marine Biology
  • Marine Geology and Geophysics
  • Natural Hazards
  • Ocean Acoustics
  • Ocean Chemistry
  • Ocean Climate Laboratory
  • Ocean Exploration
  • Ocean Physics
  • Paleoclimatology
  • Radar Meteorology
  • Regional Ocean Climatologies
  • Satellite Meteorology
  • Satellite Oceanography
  • Severe Weather
  • Space Weather
  • Surface Weather Observations
  • Upper Air Observations
  • Weather and Climate Models

• Earthquake catalog data: https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/search/

• Rock geochemical data: https://www.earthchem.org

• NASA Earth Data: https://search.earthdata.nasa.gov/search

• Climate-related datasets from the International Research Institute for Climate and Society at Columbia University IRI/LDEO Climate Data Library

• United States stream flow data (US Geological Survey): https://waterdata.usgs.gov/nwis/rt

• Other US Geological Survey data: https://data.usgs.gov/datacatalog

• https://www.dataone.org

• http://www.marine-geo.org/index.php

• National Oceanographic Data Center https://www.nodc.noaa.gov

• European Space Agency open data portal: https://climate.esa.int/en/odp/#/dashboard

• Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) Climate Data Store: https://cds.climate.copernicus.eu/cdsapp#!/search?type=dataset

You can also find data sets in individual papers or other databases. You can search Google Scholar for a topic you are interested in and download the associated data to deal with and analyze.

Specific data sets we have used so far:

• global elevation data
• a comprehensive seismic catalog
• Mauna Loa CO2
• igneous geochemistry data (additional data can be downloaded from EarthChem.org)