How to run Tobac-Tutorials

Getting started: Installation

This documentation explains how to use tobac-tutorial notebooks for tobac 2.x using an Anaconda environment. For running tutorials on your local device, create a new folder where the data will be located. When working with a Linux environment, open a terminal in your folder and clone the tobac repository from Github with:

git clone https://github.com/climate-processes/tobac

Change your directory to the tobac folder.

cd tobac

The tutorials need to be used within the v2.0-dev development branch. For fetching all branches and checking which branch you’re on, use:

git branch -a

As you can see, you’re either on v2.0-dev branch or master branch (not compatible with these tutorials, for that use examples provided on tobac master branch). You need to switch branches, so use:

git checkout --track origin/v2.0-dev

Check again which branch you’re on. The active branch will appear with a * and in green color.

git branch

Now this works fine, but you’ll also need to clone the respective repository where the tutorials are located. Change your directory pointing to the main directory and the clone the repository like before with:

cd ..
git clone https://github.com/climate-processes/tobac-tutorials
cd tobac-tutorials

This creates a second folder next to your tobac folder. Again, check what branch you’re in (you’ll notice there exists only one branch, the master branch.)

git status

In the next step, you need to create a conda environment for providing all required software dependencies. First, you would need to go down and initiate a new conda environment with:

cd ..
conda create --prefix tobac-test-env

Enter your environment’s name and the Python version of your choice. Check the travis.yml for further information on currently supported Python versions.

Activate your conda environment. Then, change to your main directory and install the tobac requirements from the provided file.

conda activate ./tobac-test-env
cd tobac
conda install -c conda-forge --file conda-requirements.txt

With this, all necessary prerequisites for running tobac are met so you can install the package. You can choose between two methods:

just install the tobac version from your current branch (v2.0-dev)
```
pip install .
```
enable to access the code from other branches as well, you can install the package with (editable mode for developers):
```
pip install -e .
```
This will enable you to update your tobac import to the version of another branch, as you checkout on that branch. Switching between branches is not necessary to run these tutorials, but could be useful if you also plan to test the latest release of tobac or code from other development branches.

Up to this point, you should have successfully installed tobac. As the tutorials are provided by Jupyter Notebook, you’ll need to install jupyter in your environment as well.

In the active environment, you need to install additional packages that are exclusively used my the tutorial notebooks. These packages are however not mandatory for the execution of tobacitself. So please type:

conda install jupyter boto3 basemap basemap-data-hires rioxarray seaborn

Running Jupyter Notebook

For running the tutorials, change the directory to where the examples are located. E.g., if you want to know how the toolset can be applied to OLR model data, write:

cd ..
cd tobac-tutorials
jupyter notebook

The Jupyter Notebook will be opened in a new browser. By clicking “Run” you can execute the code line after line and follow the examples for different data sets.

Please note: When running the tutorials for the first time, you’ll need to modify the code in the part of “Download the data: …” for downloading the example data from Zenodo. Remove # for uncommenting the lines and enabling the download (only for lines with #, not ##). You only need to download the data once. So when the data for all examples is saved in your tobac-tutorials folder, uncomment the lines again.