Python in Space Physics

Kyle Murphy, 05 October 2020

Today Dr. Angeline Burrell gave a great overview of Python in Space Physics. She focussed on Python basics, Python in Space Physics, responsible programming, and Python resources. Angeline highlighted that Python is in the top 3 computing languages and is beneficial to the Space Physics community (and scientific communities in general) as it provides students, postdocs, and researchers with transferrable skills, and is open source and free which can help to remove financial boundaries in science and research. She continued with a description of some of Python’s general applications and more specific scientific applications, how researchers can use it on Linux, Mac, and Windows (I recommend Anaconda, you can find installation instruction here), and highlighted a few of the modules that provide the foundation for scientific research in Python (Numpy, Scipy, Matplotlib). She then focussed on Space Physic’s specific modules separating them into multipurpose, observational data access, modelling tools, coordinates, orbits and ephemeris, and data analysis and file routines (see her talk for details). Angeline continued by highlighting RESEN (REproducible Software ENvironment), a project which emphasizes scientific reducibility by providing software containers that researchers can use to bundle their studies/projects allowing others to easily reproduce results. For more details on RESEN see the CEDAR talk here. Angeline concluded her talk with a discussion and overview of responsible programming including best practices, attribution, and accessibility - topics whose importance are growing as more researchers shift to Python and open source software. Here Angeline highlighted the importance of comments, coding style (PEP 8 & PEP 257), ensuring you don’t duplicate code (or unnecessarily reinvent the wheel), and providing documentation. She further highlighted the importance of citing the software you use (attribution) and the importance of opensource software and respecting the work that you might be building on (accessibility).

Within her talk Angeline provided the community with a number of resources (links to other talks, packages etc.), some of these are listed above and below in Further Reading; but for more resources please see her seminar on our YouTube channel and a link to her talk here.