Project Component

Alongside the lectures and practice, ESDS Advanced is organized around team projects that build out real NOAA/NCICS-related tools during the course.

The goal

Teams work on a project across all three weeks, finding an aspect of each module to fold into a single final product. By the end, a project should ideally bring together:

• Agentic cowork tools — for research, synthesis, reporting, and communication.
• Agentic systems — a workflow that automates or augments part of the work.
• Deep learning — a model that adds capability or insight.

Cadence

• Afternoons: dedicated project time.
• Weekly presentations: each team shares progress at the end of the week.
• Final presentation: teams present their completed product at the end of the course.

What makes a good project

Strong projects tend to:

• Solve a real NOAA/NCICS problem, not a toy example.
• Keep a human in the loop where scientific quality matters.
• Validate results rather than trusting agent or model output blindly.
• Produce something a non-technical stakeholder can actually use.

Throughout the course, keep asking how the day's material could become a piece of your team's final product.