CE640 / OC512 - Basic Matlab for Environmental Scientists and Engineers
Instructor - Dr. David Hill
Office - 207 Owen Hall
Phone - 541.737.4939
Email - dfh@oregonstate.edu
Class Time - TU 10:00 - 11:50 am
Class Location - 241 Owen Hall
Office Hours - Monday 8:30-10:00am. This is a pretty on point explanation of office hours...use them!
Class Objectives This course will provide an introduction to the numerical computing and graphics environment and programming language, MATLAB, and is intended for beginning graduate students in engineering, oceanography, atmospheric sciences and marine geosciences. The MATLAB desktop environment will be introduced and basic programming and data analysis skills will be developed, with an emphasis on writing optimized routines to analyze data sets utilizing matrix algebra and vectorization of functions. Basic graphics and visualization will be covered, including two-dimensional and three-dimensional graphing, contouring and movies. Additional topics covered will include metadata and code versioning. The course will emphasize hands-on computer lab experience during the lecture hours and out of class programming assignments.
Textbooks
- Numerous eBooks from the OSU Library (pick eBooks, search for MATLAB). Read on line or 28-day download.
- Online documentation and movies are extensive and excellent
- Tons of actual books, should you want a hard copy reference.
Assignments and Grading
- The course grade is based on weekly assignments. Depending on the class size, it is likely that I will grade only a sub-set of the assignments.
- You may discuss your assignments with others and work through common issues in a group, but you must hand in your own original work. Passing off someone else’s code as yours is academic misconduct. And, you don’t learn much that way. So, put in your own work, please and ask for help!
- Assignments are due at the start of the next class.
Academic Misconduct OSU has policies regarding what is considered academic misconduct. Since these policies are frequently updated, you should review them on a term-by-term basis at http://studentlife.oregonstate.edu/studentconduct/offenses-0. The biggest problem I run into is that students copy code from a classmate or they find solutions from a previous year and they pass off that work as their own. Please do not do this, as you don't learn anything that way.
How to Get Help
- Ask your friends (or others)
- Online help – Matlab Central (http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/) is a great place to start.
- Demos – Online or at the command prompt.
- Texts
- Ask me
Tentative Weekly Schedule
- Introduction - Matlab desktop and environment. Also, GitHub and Slack stuff...
- Data types and arrays, strings, cells, structures, scripts vs. live scripts
- m-files, functions, for loops, while loops, if statements, and so on
- File input and output, ascii, binary, tables, etc.
- Ooooo....pretty graphics
- Curve fitting and parameter estimation
- Techniques for solving differential equations (numerically)
- Time series analysis, detrending, outlier detection, filtering
- Mapping stuff, projections, etc.
- NetCDF, metadata, code version control, etc.