Climate Data and Analytics

This course examines the scientific and practical challenges of finding and utilizing climate data to derive useful information in order to inform research and decision making processes. Through lectures, readings, videos and assignments, this course will introduce different types of climate data (historical, contemporary measurements and modelled) and discuss how they can be realistically analyzed to derive useful information (both within a research and policy context). From a general discussion on what climate data is and its value, this course will then focus on finding/collected climate data and critically evaluating how it can and should be used. Further, this course will introduce students to the development of data management plans, climate data curation, and effective ways of visualizing and contextualizing climate data to a variety of target audiences. Building upon this foundational knowledge, strategies and methodologies for analyzing climate data to derive useful information related climate risk in a variety of sectors with be explored. This includes areas such as community planning, human health, engineering/infrastructure among others. Students must have access to spreadsheet software for assignments. *eligible for MES.