LFU:online

Students can read and write programs in one of the open source programming languages commonly ​​used in atmospheric sciences. They can install a programming environment with appropriate additional packages on their computer, and use it to solve scientific problems. Most importantly: they are able to expand and deepen their programming skills independently.

This beginner level course offers an introduction to programming in Python, dedicated to atmospheric sciences students without any prior experience in programming.

Students will learn and practice basic control flows (branches and loops), data structures (numbers and collections). They will learn how to write and structure programs of several dozens of lines of code, including scripts and functions. They will use packages of the scientific python ecosystem to solve common programming tasks of the atmospheric sciences, such as reading, analysing and plotting data.

In parallel, students will learn basic techniques of systematic software development, such as code-based documentation, debugging, testing and refactoring. Those techniques will be successively introduced and practiced while learning programming in Python, but their fundamentals are independent of any programming language.

Lectures (self-learning materials) at home and exercises, discussion and active learning in class.

Combined: programming project (30%), and exams at the mid (20%) and end of the semester (50%)

fabienmaussion.info/intro_to_programming

The course is taught in English