Seismic Tool-Kit Helps Scientists Research Earthquakes

We've written before of the variety of open source tools under development that help researchers predict the possibility of earthquakes. The SourceForge Community Blog highlights a new project that's helping scientists process and analyze seismic data to see what new information about earthquakes they can glean from it.

Seismic Tool-Kit (STK) reads freely distributed data from the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology and produces graphs that are "mainly oriented toward signal processing (spectral analysis, filtering, polarization analysis) for seismologists, but it is used also at schools for viewing and plotting records of earthquakes,” project developer Dominique Reymond told SourceForge.

Although the software is a bit complex for use in the standard classroom, research facilities no doubt find value in STK's advanced computational abilities. Some of its primary features include:

* Plot SAC ASCII and SAC_BIN data format, with zoom, unzoom, plot channel by channel, or plot all channels

* Data plotting: channel by channel, all channels, zoom-in, zoom-out, unfilter, instantaneous time and amplitude informations with mouse pointer

* Polarization: easy and fast particule [sic] motion representation in both horizontal plane and incidence plane, with automatic computation of best direction with eigen vectors of the covariance matrix. Display of linearity and planearity coefficient

* Evolutive Polarization: the polarization vectors are computed along the signal with a small moving time-window. The length and the step can be adjusted by users. The errors on azimuth and incidence are also plotted. The polarization coefficients are displayed by a color scale.

Disclosure: SourceForge is a client of Lisa Hoover but she derives no benefit from the company for writing this post.