ESMValTool Tutorial

This tutorial helps you to use ESMValTool.

The Earth System Model Evaluation Tool (ESMValTool) is a community developed software toolkit that aims to facilitate the diagnosis and evaluation of the causes and effects of model biases and inter-model spread within the CMIP model ensemble.

This tutorial is structured into basic and advanced topics such that episodes starting from the Introduction up to the episode on Conclusion of the basic tutorial all cover basic topics and can be done in one sitting.

The remaining episodes cover the advanced topics and each episode is a mini-tutorial covering an advanced aspect of working with ESMValTool. These mini-tutorials can be appended to the main tutorial or worked through independently.

What will you learn in this course

What is ESMValTool

How to install ESMValTool

How to configure ESMValTool for your local system

How to run ESMValTool

How to work with ESMValTool’s suite of preprocessors

How to debug your recipes

How to access and deploy recipes from the ESMValTools gallery (Advanced)

How to develop your own diagnostics and recipes (Advanced)

How to contribute your recipes and diagnostics back into ESMValTool (Advanced)

How to include new observational datasets (Advanced)

Prerequisites

The prerequisites for the tutorial are listed on the tutorial setup page.

Main things you need to know before starting this course

This tutorial can be taken online independently or taught by one of our instructors.
Don’t be alarmed if you can’t work through the entire tutorial in one sitting. It may take some time to get used to working with ESMValTool.
If you get stuck, help is always available from the tutors, from ESMValTool developers via the github issues page or via the ESMValTool email list. Please see information on how to subscribe to user mailing list.
This tutorial includes several advanced lessons after the conclusion. These advanced lessons should be treated like “mini-tutorials”, and include aspects like “developing your own diagnostic” or “how to include observations”.

Additional Resources

Documentation

ESMValTool home page

Discussions page

Papers

ESMValTool Source code

ESMValCore Source code

ESMValTool Citation info

How to cite the Tutorial

Please use citation information available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3974591.

Schedule

	Setup	Download files required for the lesson
00:00	1. Introduction	What is ESMValTool? Who are the people behind ESMValTool?
00:15	2. Quickstart guide	What is the purpose of the quickstart guide? How do I load and check the ESMValTool environment? How do I configure ESMValTool? How do I run a recipe?
00:25	3. Installation	What are the prerequisites for installing ESMValTool? How do I confirm that the installation was successful?
00:45	4. Configuration	What is the user configuration file and how should I use it?
01:05	5. Running your first recipe	How to run a recipe? What happens when I run a recipe?
01:35	6. Conclusion of the basic tutorial	What do I do now? Where can I get help? What if I find a bug? Where can I find more information about ESMValtool? How can I cite ESMValtool?
01:45	7. Writing your own recipe	How do I create a new recipe? Can I use different preprocessors for different variables? Can I use different datasets for different variables? How can I combine different preprocessor functions? Can I run the same recipe for multiple ensemble members?
02:30	8. Development and contribution	What is a development installation? How can I test new or improved code? How can I incorporate my contributions into ESMValTool?
03:00	9. Writing your own diagnostic script	How do I write a new diagnostic in ESMValTool? How do I use the preprocessor output in a Python diagnostic?
03:50	10. CMORization: adding new datasets to ESMValTool	CMORization: what is it and why do we need it? How to use the existing CMORizer scripts shipped with ESMValTool? How to add support for new (observational) datasets?
04:50	11. Debugging	How can I handle errors/warnings?
05:35	Finish

The actual schedule may vary slightly depending on the topics and exercises chosen by the instructor.