Cooking up a Storm with Project Pythia

Now in its fourth year, Project Pythia is an NSF-funded community resource for geoscientists interested in leveraging Python with their educational and research efforts. Currently, Project Pythia is focused on the development and publication of Pythia Cookbooks. Pythia Cookbooks are a collection of open-source Jupyter Book infrastructure tools and best-practices for community contributions of demonstrative Python workflows and interactive training material, backed by automation for collaborative authoring and health-checking. Pythia Cookbooks enable classroom teachers, Python professionals, students and interns, and researchers alike to share their own workflows with an emphasis on transferring skills and expertise. These Cookbooks are supported by an ecosystem of resources such as Pythia Foundations, alongside the larger online world of Python education. Additionally, Pythia Cookbooks are now citable, reproducible scholarly objects; a digital object identifier (DOI) is “minted” upon publication.

While the initial set of Pythia Cookbooks were developed by core-funded participants in the project, over the last year we have received and published contributions from the wider community. Our summer 2023 hackathon (“Cookoff”) in Boulder resulted in several new Cookbooks, on topics such as meteorological radar, machine learning as applied to Landsat data, and web map / feature services. During the fall 2023 semester, students in an advanced data visualization course at UAlbany will develop and publish Cookbooks as part of their coursework. During this presentation, we will showcase the well-established Radar Cookbook, and demonstrate the process a contributor can take to publish one of their own. Got a reproducible geoscientific workflow to contribute? Join us in June 2024 for some more “high altitude cooking” at our next Cookoff in Boulder, or contribute from your own “kitchen” anytime online!