Self-contained beginner intro tutorial

[adele-morrison]

I'm just giving instructions to a new COSIMA recipes user and am finding it hard to find a single tutorial to direct them to as a good intro. I used to direct people to https://github.com/COSIMA/cosima-recipes/blob/main/Tutorials/COSIMA_CookBook_Tutorial.ipynb which contains both cookbook tutorial on how to find experiments, variables etc, but also beginner exercises on loading, plotting, slicing, averaging etc.

I think it would be good to have a single new beginner tutorial that gives a quick summary of Intake instead of cookbook and then has all the same beginner exercises on plotting, averaging etc.

Options could be:

1. Modify https://github.com/COSIMA/cosima-recipes/blob/main/Tutorials/ACCESS-NRI_Intake_Catalog.ipynb to add beginner exercises on plotting, averaging at the end. But maybe this has more detail on Intake than a beginner needs to get started? It also still has references to the cookbook ("With the cookbook querying.getvar function...") which would confuse a beginner who doesn't know about the cookbook.
2. Make a duplicate of https://github.com/COSIMA/cosima-recipes/blob/main/Tutorials/COSIMA_CookBook_Tutorial.ipynb which uses on Intake and no cookbook, then in a year or so we could delete the existing Cookbook version of this tutorial.

[navidcy]

1. I would like to remove any references to the cookbook from ACCESS-NRI_Intake_Catalog.ipynb. When I suggested that I was pointed that there are more detailed intake tutorials at ACCESS-NRI websites..

2. That's also good idea. Happy with that! Even delete the cookbook earlier than later -- there is always a tendency to hold on to old stuff too long that makes it just harder for people to move on.

[adele-morrison]

Great, let's go with 2.

We can't delete the cookbook quite yet. Not all experiments have been / can be added to Intake yet.

[navidcy]

I'm not suggesting we delete. But I'm just pushing for sooner rather than later.

[Thomas-Moore-Creative]

Is there a list of "tools"/"functions" we'd like a beginner to be able to use to explore and discover data? Functions that would take a catalog / datastore object as input? (intake_dataframe_catalog.core.DfFileCatalog or intake_esm.core.esm_datastore)

I'm building my own ( possibly silly and very pre-alpha ) functions that do things like . . . and display a basic table and dictionary:

• Generate a table of unique values for each category in the esm_datastore_object.
• Extract information about a variable from an intake-esm catalog object.
• Find the naitive NetCDF chunking information for a dataset in an esm_datastore.

I'd like to think the community could request and also help build these kind of functions over at ACCESS-NRI repos? ACCESS-NRI/access-nri-intake-catalog#218

[rbeucher]

@Thomas-Moore-Creative , That's a good idea. Please submit a PR to the repo and we will review it.

[Thomas-Moore-Creative]

@Thomas-Moore-Creative , That's a good idea. Please submit a PR to the repo and we will review it.

Had opened an issue here - ACCESS-NRI/access-nri-intake-catalog#218
@aidanheerdegen is suggesting a repo in https://github.com/ACCESS-Community-Hub . This sounds good to me as a start.

[Thomas-Moore-Creative]

[ apologies if I am hijacking this @adele-morrison but feel that these kind of tools will be needed for beginners (and the rest) as CC falls away and gravity shifts to ACCESS-NRI intake catalog ? ]