National Weather Model data on Azure#
This collection of notebooks was presented at the 2023 CIROH Training and Developers Conference. We’ll cover the basics of accessing National Water Model data from Azure using tools from the Pangeo ecosystem and the Planetary Computer.
Goals#
We hope you’ll get a few things out of this workshop:
Learn about the massive amount of data available on Azure, including the National Water Model, that’s available to you. (See the Planetary Computer catalog for an overview).
Learn some of the basics of cloud-native geospatial, and how to best use these datasets from Azure.
Learn how to use tools from the Pangeo ecosystem to work with large geospatial datasets on the cloud.
Learn how the Planetary Computer enables efficient access to these datasets.
Accessing the Compute: https://aka.ms/ciroh-hub#
This workshop is intended to be interactive! While you can just follow along, we really do encourage you to work through the materials along with us. We’ve deployed a JupyterHub on Azure Kubernetes Service, so you have fast access to the data. Click the button below to launch your notebook server. Pick a unique username and use the password we share at the conference to log in.
Note that the JupyterHub we’re using for this workshop will go away at the end of the day. You can deploy your own Hub, or use one of the other compute services on Microsoft to access the data. If you’re not sure whether you have access to Azure, reach out and we’ll help you.
Background#
Attendees will get the most out of this workshop if they have some knowledge of Python, pandas and xarray, but we’ll do our best to introduce the concepts. You don’t need any knowledge of cloud computing or parallel computing with Dask.
If you’re new to Python, xarray, or Jupyter, the Pythia Foundations book has a good introduction.