Accessing data

Date

Links of interest

• Effects of a December 2025 atmospheric river in Washington state.

Notes

We discussed:

1. The state of data that you might encounter, from ideal (e.g., digital and well-documented) to unideal (e.g., in deprecated file formats or unorganized).
2. Ways to access data, once again from ideal (e.g., via dedicated APIs) to unideal (e.g.,having to digitize and compile data yourself).
3. Good practices for working with data. Some of these practices include:
   • Separating data from code.
   • Along those lines, not storing data in a repository.
   • Writing well-documented code that pulls data into a directory, so that anyone can reconstruct analyses from scratch.
   • Preserving a snapshot of data at time of publication.
   • Storing raw data separately from modified data.
4. APIs and how to use them.

Following lecture, we used the Paleobiology Database’s data service API to plot marine diversity over the last 600 million years of Earth history.

We also worked in teams to assemble climatic and environmental data for an extreme weather event. See the corresponding assignment page for more details.