OUTLINE

Purpose of the course:

To provide oceanography students with some skills needed to use computer-based tools to acquire, process and analyze oceanographic (and other) data.

Principal software tools:

In the School of Oceanography at the UW the software tools most commonly used by faculty and students to process data appears to be MS EXCEL and MATLAB. In this course we will concentrate on using MS EXCEL to process data.

The operational plan:

In this course we will take several examples of oceanographic data and use EXCEL to process each data set. EXCEL will be found on PC’s running the WINDOWS operating system. Therefore an integral part of this course will be learning to work with this operating system.

It is most important that students get hands on experience with the computers. This will require practice and a fair amount of trial and error in order to become familiar with the tremendous potential of these programs. It is hoped that students will help each other. To this end groups of 3 or so will be set up to share knowledge and help one another. However this is only a teaching aid and each student should make sure they can do all the work themselves by practicing alone.

The acquisition, processing and interpretation of typical data.

A common scenario in experimental science is that a hypothesis is made and then an experiment devised to test the hypothesis. The experimental procedure nearly always involves the acquisition of raw data from an instrument or instruments, the processing of the data so as to put it in a form that is most easily interpretable, and finally the interpretation and presentation of the data in a form that allows an evaluation of the original hypothesis.

These days it is very common that these 3 steps are done on a computer. Hence the importance of being able to use computers.

Step 1. In the acquisition of data the following flow is common:

| sensor (s) | ---> | computer| ---> | computer storage device (disk, tape etc) |

Step 2. In the processing of data the following flow is common:

| computer storage device | ---> | computer file system | ---> | processing procedure | --> | output data |

Step 3. In the outputting of results the presentation of data in a visual form that relates to the hypothesis being tested is a very powerful method of convincing peers of the validity of the experiment. Therefore tools that assist in making graphs or charts are very important. In this course we will be not be concerned directly with step 1, data acquisition, but will concentrate on steps 2 and 3.