Software

Information on software that is useful for the lab.

Integrated Development Environment

In the lab, we do a lot of data analysis using Python, both locally and on JASMIN. To streamline this process, it is useful to have an IDE where you can do everything. Some options are listed below:

• VS Code: Probably the most popular choice
• Pycharm: Pretty good alternative, they have a free student pack as well.
• Cursor: Like VS Code but more focused on AI. Students get one year free. Not sure if it has support for Jupyter notebooks yet, though.

Python

Here we provide some useful libraries to use for Python.

climdyn_tools

This is a package containing code created by members of the lab.

xarray

Most of our data analysis is performed by manipulating xarray Datasets in Jupyter notebooks.

Organisation

Here are some useful applications for writing as well as keeping track of research, literature.

Microsoft Teams

This is where we organize group meetings and share interesting results.

Zotero

Zotero is a free, open-source reference manager that helps you collect, organize, and cite research materials. They have a useful web extension. We also have a shared lab library to keep track of papers we have discussed as a group.

Overleaf

Overleaf is useful for writing up papers.

Diary

It is useful to have a diary to keep notes day to day.

I use logseq as it is free, open source, and you write in Markdown which is easy to use. It is also easy to embed equations in LaTeX, as well as images. It is probably easiest to use this as a diary but allows for much more complexity with tags and links.

Alternatives to this include Notion and Obsidian. I think all three of these support Zotero integration as well.