Landlab Jupyter Notebooks: Tools for learning about earth surface processes and how to model them
Abstract
Learning to use a numerical model of surface processes and learning about surface processes from numerical model results are two different things. Usually someone learns to use these models because they want to learn about surface processes. On the other hand, many times people want to learn about surface processes from a model without learning the details of how to model or code. These two distinct objectives require different types of training. Here we present Landlab Jupyter Notebooks that are created to address these separate goals. The number of notebooks is continually growing, and we welcome contributions. They are all open source and available through https://github.com/landlab.
Landlab Tutorials are Jupyter Notebooks that teach users about the Landlab modeling toolkit. To build a model with Landlab, a user must know how to create or import a grid, set boundary conditions and initialize variables, initialize and run surface processes components on the grid, and visualize data. For each one of these steps, we have built at least one Landlab Tutorial. These tutorials are designed to teach users enough skills so that they can recreate and modify the code to meet their needs. We cannot predict exactly how users will want to use Landlab, but we can train them on how Landlab works so that they have the freedom and confidence to change model set-up, parameters, and surface processes without seeing exact examples of what they want to do. Landlab Teaching Tools are Jupyter Notebooks designed for students (in a classroom or independently) who want to learn from a model without learning how to create a model. For example, students in an introductory surface water hydrology course learn about hydrographs. One of the Notebooks teaches students about hydrograph sensitivity to watershed shape. Students who run the overland flow Notebook should have a better understanding of overland flow, even without knowing what Landlab is. All of the teaching tools have an introduction, including references and preliminary questions. The code is followed by directed questions that require students to change parameter values or options and rerun the code to create new plots. The teaching tools can be run locally, or on HydroShare (https://www.hydroshare.org), allowing students to run the Notebooks without installing Landlab locally.- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2019
- Bibcode:
- 2019AGUFMED13D0896G
- Keywords:
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- 0810 Post-secondary education;
- EDUCATION;
- 0825 Teaching methods;
- EDUCATION;
- 0845 Instructional tools;
- EDUCATION;
- 0850 Geoscience education research;
- EDUCATION