Non-diffusive atmospheric flow #15: Wrap-up

OK, so we’re done with this epic of climate data analysis. I’ve prepared an index of the articles in this series, on the off chance that it might be useful for someone.

The goal of this exercise was mostly to try doing some “basic” climate data analysis tasks in Haskell, things that I might normally do using R or NCL or some cobbled-together C++ programs. Once you can read NetCDF files, a lot of the data manipulation is pretty easy, mostly making use of standard things from the hmatrix package. It’s really not any harder than doing these things using “conventional” tools. The only downside is that most of the code that you need to write to do this stuff in Haskell already exists in those “conventional” tools. A bigger disadvantage is that data visualisation tools for Haskell are pretty thin on the ground–diagrams and Chart are good for simpler two-dimensional plots, but maps and geophysical data plotting aren’t really supported at all. I did all of the map and contour plots here using UCAR’s NCL language which although it’s not a very nice language from a theoretical point of view, has built-in capabilities for generating more or less all the plot types you’d ever need for climate data.

I think that this has been a reasonably useful exercise. It helped me to fix a couple of problems with my hnetcdf package and it turned up a bug in hmatrix. But it went on a little long–my notes are up to 90 pages. (Again: the same thing happened on the FFT stuff.) That’s too long to maintain interest in a problem you’re just using as a finger exercise. The next thing I have lined up should be quite a bit shorter. It’s a problem using satellite remote sensing data, which is always fun.