Nowcasting for hands-on session OWM Academy

Three exercises to get familiar with radar data and nowcasting. Background information and the exercices are further explained in the notebooks, but first follow the steps below.

Pre-requisites for the “hands-on session”

The exercises in this session will be done by using Google Colab notebooks, which ensures that you are all going to use the same Python version. Therefore the attendees are expected to create a Google account before the session and copy the example notebooks to their Google Drive. The material will be provided in the GitHub repository.

1. Create a Google account

If you don't yet have a Google account, create it here.

2. Install Google Chrome

For the best experience, we recommend using Google Chrome for this session. Firefox, Microsoft Edge and Safari should also work, but they might not support all functionalities needed for using the Google services.

3. Clone GitHub Repositories and copy notebooks to Colab

This step is required for running the Colab notebooks shared through the GitHub repository. Sign in to your Google account, go to Colab and run the following commands in a new notebook.

# mount your Google drive to access it from Colab
import os
from google.colab import drive
drive.mount("mnt")
%cd mnt/MyDrive
# clone the repository from GitHub
!git clone https://github.com/RubenImhoff/nowcasting-hands-on-OWM-academy.git
# create notebook directory (if it doesn't already exist)
if not os.path.exists('Colab Notebooks'):
    !mkdir 'Colab Notebooks'
# copy the course notebooks to the above folder
!cp nowcasting-hands-on-OWM-academy/notebooks/*.ipynb 'Colab Notebooks'

Now you can open the example notebooks in Colab by either navigating through your 'Colab Notebooks' folder or by uploading them if you have stored them locally. Note, from experience we can say that it is easiest to open the notebooks directly from you Google Drive after having followed the previous steps. Go to your Google drive (drive.google.com) and open the folder "Colab Notebooks" --> open the folder "notebooks" --> click on the exercise that you are going to do (for instance, exercise01_input_data.ipynb).

4. Perform the three exercises in the Colab Notebooks

Start with "exercise01_input_data.ipynb" and continue with exercise02 and exercise03. At the end of these exercises, you should have a good first idea of handling radar rainfall data, producing nowcasts and using pysteps.