TEXAS Interactive Tutorial

Welcome to the TEXAS interactive tutorial — a hands-on guide for paleoceanographers and paleolimnologists who want to understand how and why TEXAS reconstructs past temperatures from GDGTs, without needing a statistics background.

Who this is for

You know your proxies. You’ve worked with TEX86 or Ring Index data, you understand what GDGTs are and why they record temperature — but the Bayesian machinery behind TEXAS may feel like a black box. This tutorial is designed to open that box, one concept at a time, using interactive visualizations rather than equations.

What you will learn

Module	Topic	Key question answered
1	What is a prior?	How do we encode what we already know before looking at data?
2	Bayesian updating	How does new data change our beliefs?
3	The calibration curve	What do the four curve parameters actually control?
4	What MCMC does	Why do we get 4,000 answers instead of one?
5	Reading your results	How do I interpret credible intervals on a temperature reconstruction?

How to use these notebooks

Each module is a Jupyter notebook. Run cells top to bottom. The interactive widgets (sliders, dropdowns) require a live kernel — they will not work in a static PDF or HTML export, but will work in JupyterLab or VS Code with the Jupyter extension.

Tip

Start with Module 3 if you want to build intuition for the calibration curve right away. Modules 1 and 2 are foundational but not required to understand Module 3.