The Landlab tutorials

Two papers have been written describing Landlab, both are open access:

Note

We highly recommend reading both before starting on the steps below.

1. Format and Outline

You will alternate between reading documentation on the User Guide finding information in the Reference Manual, and working through the tutorials.

The tutorials are presented as Jupyter notebooks, which contain a mixture of text, images, and code blocks. When you look at the tutorials, don’t just read them. Start by clearing the results by selecting Kernel → Restart & Clear Output, then go ahead and try running each code block as you come to it.

1.1 A motivating example

1.2 Using the Documentation

The Landlab Reference Manual contains documentation for most functions in the Landlab package. It is the comprehensive counterpart to the anecdotal tutorials.

  • Spend some time clicking around in the User Guide and Reference Manual to get a sense for what is there. Tip: to find a particular command, click on Index and use your browser’s search function to search for a command by name or keyword. For example, look at the LinearDiffuser, which you just used in the prior tutorial.

1.3 Introduction to the Landlab Grid and Fields

First, lets look at the User Guide page on Landlab grids.

Extra credit: Go back to the Hobley et al. 2017 publication and identify the ordering conventions of nodes, links, and other grid elements.

1.4 Working with Digital Elevtion Models (DEMs)

1.5 Plotting

1.6 Boundary conditions

1.7 Introduction to Components

1.8 Advanced Grid and Fields: Gradients, Flux-Divergence, Mapping

In addition to having lots of important information about adjacency of nodes, links, and other grid elements, the Landlab Grid object has a number of built-in functions for calculating quantities like gradients and flux-divergence, and for mapping quantities from nodes to links and so forth. Work through these tutorials to get a sense of this functionality: