If you're not attending Unidata's AMS Short Course on Data Management, you might be interested in the Short Course on GIS for Atmospheric Sciences being taught by instructors from the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the University of North Carolina. Both Short Courses take place on Sunday, 10 January 2016, preceding the 96th AMS Annual Meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana.
From the Short Course announcement:
In recent years geographic information systems (GIS) and other geospatial technologies have become increasingly important to the atmospheric sciences community. The use of GIS in many traditional atmospheric organizations has expanded greatly and has become an important tool in both the private and public sectors for such applications as data integration, decision making, mapping, and information dissemination. Today, GIS has become very interoperable with weather, climate, and hydrometeorological data.
This course will teach basic GIS theory and methods using the Environmental Systems Research Institute's (Esri) ArcGIS for Desktop platform. All hands-on exercises will use weather and climate case studies in order to illustrate the power of GIS technology for integrating physical weather and climate datasets with more traditional GIS socio-economic and infrastructure spatial datasets. This course is aimed at traditional atmospheric science students and faculty as well as professional meteorologists and climatologists working in both the private and public sectors. Each section in this course will be formatted into a short lecture and detailed hands-on exercise. During the lecture portion, geospatial theory will be explained, followed the hands-on lab exercise where participants can work with ArcMap and ArcCatalog software using real weather and climate datasets.
Key concepts covered will include exploring spatial data with ArcMap and ArcCatalog, data symbology and classification, cartographic mapping, and coordinate systems and map projections. Case studies will include historical tornado tracks, the 2012 drought in Texas, Hurricane Sandy's track and impacts, the Superstorm of 1993, and modeled climate simulations.
Conference programs, registration, hotel, and general information for the Annual Meeting are available at the meeting website. To register for the short course from the meeting site, select Short Course Registration, and look for AMS Short Course on GIS Tutorial for Atmospheric Sciences. You'll have to log in to register for the course, so have your AMS login information handy. Registration fees are discounted by $40 until 1 December 2015.
For more information see the Short Course web page or contact Jennifer Boehnert at NCAR (tel: 303-497-2858; e-mail: boehnert@ucar.edu, or Greg Dobson at UNC (tel:828-251-6973; e-mail: gdobson@unca.edu.
