HWR 597a: Computational Tools in EOS Hydrology -- Spring 2002


This course is designed to give students an intensive introduction to Unix shell, awk, graphics and image processing tools to solve conceptually simple but data intensive computational questions in hydrology. Examples will be drawn from the instructor's NASA-EOS (Earth Observing System) project on alpine hydrology and other research projects. The need for the tools that students will develop in this workshop is highlighted by the very large data sets and large number of simple calculations encountered in using EOS data.


Instructor: Roger Bales
Office Hours: by appointment (sign-up sheet on office door)
Email: roger@hwr.arizona.edu
Teaching Assistant: Ray Brice -- email: ray@hwr.arizona.edu

Class meets: F 10:00-10:50, Harshbarger 110. There will be an hour lecture & questions. Ray Brice will be available for help during office hours in Harshbarger 248 (Fridays 11-12; Thursdays 2-4). Questions can also be emailed to Ray or Dr. Bales.

Prerequisites: Familiarity with computer use.

Important Dates:

Handouts: Spring 2002 Homeworks and Exercises

Grading:

Assignment      Value
___________     _______
Homework #1     100 pts
Homework #2     100 pts
Homework #3     200 pts
Homework #4     300 pts
Exercises       300 pts
-----------------------
Total           1000 pts

Additional Materials

You will need to Customize a X-Win32 Session in order to open an xterm from the Lab PC's. The following link will help you do it. How to Customize X-win32

You need to become proficient in a Unix text editor. There are several to choose from, such as vi, emacs, textedit, dtpad, or pico. vi and emacs are the most powerful and learning either of them will come in handy if you continue to use Unix. Here are some vi tutorials:

Here are some Emacs tutorials:

A very good on-line Unix help can be found here.

The AWK Chapter from Unix in a Nutshell (O'Reilly) can be found here.

UNIX Utilities - awk (PC Webopedia) here.

You can use the handout Learning xvgr to help you with Assignment 3.

Here is a reference comparing GIF and JPEG formats:

Here are some resources for HTML programming: