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Online Laboratory for Climate Science and Meteorology

Welcome to the documentation for the Online Laboratory for Climate Science and Meteorology, lab.climet.eu!

If you are familiar with JupyterLab, you should feel right at home with the user interface of this lab. In fact, this laboratory is built using JupyterLite, "a JupyterLab distribution that runs entirely in [your] browser" by leveraging WebAssembly. In other words, while you typically need to install JupyterLab on your own machine or connect to a server that executes your code, JupyterLite runs installation-free in your webbrowser and allows your code, data, and information to stay entirely on your machine. To run Python code within your browser, JupyterLite uses Pyodide, "a Python distribution for the browser [...] based on WebAssembly".

While Pyodide already supports an extensive list of scientific Python packages, which we have contributed to, this laboratory comes with additional packages that are commonly used in the weather and climate science community, including (but not limited to) metpy, cfgrib, earthkit, and xeofs.

Quickly Getting Started

  • Open an existing git repository in the online lab
  • Open an existing gist in the online lab
  • Open an existing file URL in the online lab

Getting Started

To get started, go to lab.climet.eu, wait for the JupyterLab to load, and click the blue + button in the top left to open a new launcher and create a new Python notebook from there. After the Python kernel has initialised, you can execute Python code in the cells of the notebook.

Tip

While many Python packages can be imported directly, additional pure Python packages can also be loaded by executing the %pip install <PACKAGE> magic inside a cell, after which the package can be imported.

Note

The online laboratory has only been tested in recent Firefox and Chrome browsers. Some features may not (yet) be supported in Safari browsers.

Attention

The online laboratory runs with the strict memory constraints of your web browser. It is therefore recommended to only open and execute one or two notebooks at a time. When a notebook is closed, the kernel will automatically shutdown to preserve resources.

If the online lab runs out of memory, you can save your work, close the notebook, and try to restart it. If you are still running low on memory, you should first download a copy of your notebooks, then reload the notebook page, re-upload the notebook, and continue working on them.

If you intend on executing memory intensive workloads, it is best to continue working on the notebooks locally instead. The online laboratory is primarily designed for initial exploration and for sharing codes in a reproducible environment.

Caution

In the online laboratory, changes to notebooks and local files are only saved in your web browser's storage and not persisted to disk.

Please download copies of any files that you don't want to lose.

Your files from an old session will usually be kept if you close or refresh this page, unless your browser's storage for lab.climet.eu is cleared, e.g.

  • manually by clearing the browser's site data
  • automatically when too much data is stored
  • automatically when you close a private browsing context
  • if you have setup your browser to clear site data, e.g. when the browser is closed

Getting Help and Contributing

This laboratory is being developed at https://github.com/climet-eu/lab. If you come across a bug or would like to suggest a new feature or support for an additional Python package, please submit an issue at https://github.com/climet-eu/lab/issues/.

License

Licensed under the Mozilla Public License, Version 2.0 (https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/2.0/).

Funding

The Online Laboratory for Climate Science and Meteorology has been developed as part of ESiWACE3, the third phase of the Centre of Excellence in Simulation of Weather and Climate in Europe.

Funded by the European Union. This work has received funding from the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (JU) under grant agreement No 101093054.