NCL Home > Training > Webinars

Webinars: Introduction to NCL Processing

These webinars are similar to the "NCL Processing" lecture we give in our NCL workshops, but broken down into several individual webinars. They are geared towards new users of NCL, but assume you have basic knowledge of NCL syntax and NCL file I/O.

  1. Building blocks and fundamentals
  2. Commonly used utility functions
  3. User-created functions
  4. Creating and handling metadata
  5. Regridding
  6. EOFs and compositing

If you are completely new to NCL, we recommend that you watch this set of webinars first:

Webinar #1 - building blocks and fundamentals
December 15, 2014 at 10:15 AM MST
Dennis Shea, presenter
Slides as a PDF file
Recorded presentation as an MP4 file (1 hour)

This webinar covers:

  • clean coding tips
  • algebraic operators
  • logical expressions
  • array creation, reduction, operators
  • if statements
  • do loops
  • where statement
  • error messages

Webinar #2 - commonly used utility functions
December 16, 2014 at 10:15 AM MST
Dennis Shea, presenter
Slides as a PDF file
Recorded presentation as an MP4 file (1.3 hours)

This webinar covers some of the most common and useful built-in functions needed by most NCL users, including functions for:

  • generating arrays of numbers
  • masking arrays
  • performing array operations based on logical expressions
  • checking for missing data
  • converting to/from various time and date formats
  • processing strings
  • executing UNIX system calls

There were two questions in this webinar, which are covered in these brief slides:

  1. how to calculate weekly averages from annual averages
  2. how to use ind and ind_resolve

Webinar #3 - user-created functions and maintaining metadata
December 17, 2014 at 10:15 AM MST
Dennis Shea, presenter
Slides as a PDF file
Recorded presentation as an MP4 file (1 hour)

This webinar covers how to create your own NCL functions and procedures. This webinar was originally also going to discuss metadata, but this has been moved to a future webinar.

Webinar #4 - creating and handling metadata
January 8, 2015 at 9:15 AM MST
Dennis Shea, presenter
Slides as a PDF file
Recorded presentation as an MP4 file (50 minutes)

This webinar covers how to create and handle metadata when doing calculations in NCL.

Webinar #5 - regridding
January 9, 2015 at 10:15 AM MST
Dennis Shea, presenter
Slides as a PDF file
Questions & answers on "chat"
Recorded presentation as an MP4 file (1 hour 10 minutes)

This webinar covers a variety of functions in NCL that you can use for regridding data.

Webinar #6 - EOFs (empirical orthogonal functions) and compositing
January 14, 2015 @ 10:15 AM MST
Dennis Shea, presenter
Slides as a PDF file
Recorded presentation as an MP4 file (51 minutes)

This webinar covers how to calculate EOFs and do compositing.

Remaining (as yet unscheduled) webinars will cover:

  • Calling external Fortran and C codes from NCL
  • Using NCL as a scripting tool
  • Variable scoping rules
  • The special "list" variable