Software

Some of the software we use within our lab/group.

Scientific software

Seismic data acquisition

  • Earthworm: A modular, open-source, real-time seismic monitoring system used by most volcano observatories and many regional seismic networks. Since we have no telemetred data of our own currently, our main use for Earthworm is to stream data from IRIS DMC (or elsewhere) and run event detections.
  • SeisComP3: A real-time seismic monitoring system developed at GFZ Potsdam (Germany) and by the spin-off company GemPa. It excels particularly in the quality of graphical user interfaces and for tsunami monitoring. Most of it is free, although there are some modules which require a license.
  • Antelope: A modular real-time seismic monitoring and database-driven data analysis environment. A commercial licence is required to use it for real-time monitoring.

Real-time data visualization: Software that often drives real-time data displays in an Operations Room

  • RSAM: Real-time Seismic Amplitude Measurement. Originally developed c.1985, the original RSAM system was a PC-based system that used an analog-to-digital converter to average incoming analog seismic data streams and provide average amplitudes every 2.56s. Real-time bar graph displays show the average at each station over the past 10s, 1 minute & 10 minutes. A simple detector counts trigger events on each station. 1-minute and 10-minute RSAM data are saved to binary files. And threshold-duration alarms can be configured for events (lasting 10s of seconds) and tremor (lasting minutes).
  • IceWeb: Near-real time spectrograms. Originally developed c.1998, has been a core monitoring tool at the Alaska Volcano Observatory for almost 18 years, and versions of it have been running at CVO, HVO and MVO. A modern, Java-based version of IceWeb called PENSIVE has recently been developed at the Alaska Volcano Observatory
  • SWARM:Seismic Waveform Analysis and Real-time Monitor. A Java program written by Dan and Peter Cervelli while at AVO which provides a convenient way to mimic helical drum recorders but with none of the disadvantages of unblocking pens and changing sheets of paper. Waveform data can be easily rescaled or zoomed, and spectra and spectrograms can be generated on demand. SWARM was written to interface with data stored in an Earthworm or Winston wave server but it now conveniently can also work with a Seedlink server, allowing us to easily plot any data held by on the Seedlink server run by IRIS DMC.

Data analysis software

  • SWARM: While SWARM is frequently used to display real-time helicorders, it is also a powerful data analysis tool.
  • Antelope: While Antelope is a real-time seismic monitoring system, it is also an database-driven data analysis environment. Antelope really excels for processing campaign/archived data. Has APIs in Perl, Python, C, Fortran & MATLAB, which make it easy to develop new programs/modules/functions. Some of the core Antelope codes, like dbdetect, are written in C and the source code is not available, so this can make it a bit of a black box.
  • ObsPy: A Python toolbox for seismology. Python supports MATLAB-like functionality through numpy, scipy and matplotlib. ObsPy is probably the fastest growing seismological toolbox in recent years and it is best to install it via Anaconda Python Distribution.
  • GISMO: A MATLAB toolbox for seismology. Includes the waveform suite from Celso Reyes', Mike West's cross-correlation analysis classes, and more recent tools for analyzing earthquake catalogs.
  • sac (Seismic Analysis Code): Used by a lot of seismologists for processing and plotting earthquake data. Written in C.
  • Seisan: A seismic event processing and analysis system (mainly for producing earthquake catalogs). Integrated with a range of Fortran codes commonly used in seismology.

Map making software

  • gmt (Generic Mapping Tools): Useful for plotting maps. Often used in conjunction with sac and Perl scripts. Written in C.

For installation instructions, see "How to install seismic software on my computer"

Office productivity software

For USF faculty and students these are available directly on MacOS and Windows, or via Applications > USF Apps on Linux desktops, or via http://apps.usf.edu.

  • MS Office: Word, Excel, Powerpoint etc. For writing manuscripts, spreadsheetin data, and putting together presentations. Excel is quite powerful, but very often a few lines of MATLAB or Python code will be a better choice than a spreadsheet, and your plots will probably look better too.
  • Adobe Illustrator: For creating figures, and enhancing those produced by other software e.g. ObsPy and GISMO/MATLAB.

Free Office Productivity Cloud-based software

Free software to enable you to synchronize Office documents, scientific paper PDFs and notes, source code and to do lists across multiple computers and other devices, and also share them with others and work collaboratively.

  • Dropbox: For synchronising your documents across multiple computers / operating systems. If you're not using Linux, instead consider OneDrive (or Office365 which USF faculty have) which also gives you online MS Office editing capabilities, or Google Drive which offers USF students unlimited free storage.
  • Mendeley Desktop: Think of it as Dropbox for scientific papers. You just drag and drop your PDFs and it organizes them. Allows you to add notes, comments, highlights directly on the screen, and they get synced to "The Cloud" and other computers you run Mendeley Desktop on. You might never need to print out a paper again. A great tool for getting all your scientific literature organized!.
  • git & github.com: If you're writing code, I strongly recommend you use version control. It'll keep all your code well organized and allow you to "roll back" any code changes that turn out to be bad moves. It also provides a full backup of the entire history of your code. A decent alternative to github.com is Google Code. Ask me for more details of either.
  • Asana: A Task management, i.e. to do lists. Particularly effective within a group, as it provides a better mechanism to assign tasks to other people and keep track of outstanding tasks. Can cut down significantly on email traffic!
  • Trello: Another Task management website/application. Particularly effective when you have multiple categories of lists to keep track of

- Glenn, 2013/09/05 (last update 2016/01/28 by cmsmith10)