Resources

This is a curated list of software/tools/resource guides that I have found useful over the years.

Remote Sensing Data and Analysis

Google Earth Engine – the default environment for processing satellite imagery
UAF Alaska Satellite Facility – great selection of tutorials on SAR data and processing
NASA ARSET video tutorials – cover topics spanning flood detection, water quality monitoring, land cover mapping, etc.
ML 4 RS – earthlab.ai curated page of ML resources for remote sensing, with focus on introductory materials; covers topics like land cover classification and time-series analysis. Draws heavily on Medium and Towards Data Science posts.

Geospatial impact evaluation (GIE)
Power calculations for regression discontinuity designs (Calonico, Cattaneo, et al.) – and Stata commands
Power calculations for panel model experiments (Burlig, Preonas, and Woerman 2019) – and Stata commands
Power dashboard: Cash transfer size, nonlinearities, and benchmarking (Kondylis and Loeser 2021) – cloud-based dashboard with user customization of power calculation input parameters

DevInfo
IndiaStat – all data available through IndiaStat’s sector-specific associate sites (e.g., through IndiaAgriStat and IndiaEnergyStat) is also retrievable from the main IndiaStat site
ICRISAT – Village Dynamics in South Asia
NCAER ARIS-REDS
India Human Development Survey – NCAER & UMD
India WaterTool
datameet – India’s open data community, on Google Groups

Crop listing codes (converted from Appendix-2) – category groupings are blank in the “CODE” column and include all crops until the next category (XLSX format)
NCO_Codes_2006 (converted from Appendix-2) – unsure which vintage of NCO codes these are drawn from, but this is the tabular form [converted using smallPDF.com] of the PDF documentation (XLSX format)

Mapping Indian Districts Across Census Years, 1971-2001 (Kumar and Somanathan 2009, PDF)
State and District Boundary Changes in India, 1961-2001 (Kumar and Somanathan 2015, PDF)

FuzzyWuzzy and a FuzzyWuzzy Python/Stata tutorial on string matching across datasets (files)
Sublime Text 3 – my Python editor of choice
Atom – all-purpose text editor with great add-on capabilities
Seaborn – attractive alternative to matplotlib and pyplot for data visualization
Homebrew – the best Mac OS package manager
pythex – Python regular expressions tester

Climate Data Operators (CDO) – indispensable suite of statistical tools for working with climate data; Python bindings by Try2Code
netCDF Operator (NCO) tools – command-line tools for working with netCDFs
Panoply – straightforward visualization tool for netCDF/HDFx/GRIB files

Demographic & Health Surveys (DHS Program)
Markus Eberhardt’s incredibly-helpful Development Economics data link dump
BREAD’s list of resources
Poverty Probability Index
- Mark Schreiner’s comprehensive listing of all Simple Poverty Scorecard poverty assessment tool surveys
High Resolution Settlement Layer (HRSL) – 1 arc-second, global gridded population estimates using census data and DigitalGlobe imagery, developed by Facebook’s Connectivity Lab