This is an assignment I’ve given to students who are pretty new to Python (but not programming necessarily, which is why I list as “intermediate”), and it seems to work well. The idea is that they grab a Preliminary Monthly Climate Report for any NWS climate location, and copy that data into a text file. From there, they read in data from the text file, do some simple calculations (like the monthly average high temperature), and also plot the time series of various quantities. A ‘deeper analysis’ piece would have them identify dates where fronts came through the area based on shifts in temperature, winds, precip, etc.
Pandas and Numpy (csv data)
Numpy (basics)
Matplotlib: Basics
Matplotlib: Intermediate