Teaching Seismic Data Analysis with the GISMO toolbox for MATLAB

Summary

GISMO is an object-oriented toolbox for seismic data analysis, and a set of tutorials are being built around this. Students learn how to read seismic waveform and event catalog data either from local files or databases or from FDSN seismic data centers around the world, make a variety of timeseries and spatial plots that are commonly used in seismology to get an understanding of the data. Other topics covered are how to deal with missing data, filtering, instrument correction, spectral analysis, and STA/LTA event detection. More advanced topics include template matching and seismic swarm analysis using the cross-correlation class. Finally, some applications built using GISMO are highlighted. The goal is to equip students with the skills to build their own seismic data analysis workflows using GISMO, as an alternative to more cumbersome tools like SAC and Seisan. It assumed that students already have experience with MATLAB programming.

Learning Goals

This course is complementary to a course in Theoretical or Observational Seismology. It focuses on learning how to work with seismic data. The GISMO toolbox is written in MATLAB, and MATLAB code is used throughout the course to weave together various components of GISMO into workflows that demonstrate some of its capabilities, as well as highlight aspects of seismic data processing. The hope is that by making the GISMO toolbox and these teaching materials available, students and professors will have a much easier learning curve and may contribute new and improved code back, enhancing the GISMO toolbox further.

Context for Use

These teaching materials are aimed at senior undergraduate and graduate students in geophysics/seismology, and their professors. A typical teaching environment might be a computer lab equipped with a teaching computer + projector. Or anyone can use these materials to learn at their own pace. For students not familiar with MATLAB programming I find it useful to offer a short course on MATLAB Programming prior to this course. For example, I think it is useful for students to have mastered writing their own MATLAB functions.

Syllabus

Description and Teaching Materials

Teaching Notes and Tips

Assessment

References and Resources

https://github.com/geoscience-community-codes/GISMO

https://github.com/geoscience-community-codes/GISMO/wiki

http://serc.carleton.edu/dev/NAGTWorkshops/data_models/matlab15/activities/115068.html

What's in a name?

GISMO originally stood for Geophysical Institute Seismic Matlab Objects. Now it stands for Geophysical Investigation in Seismology with Matlab Objects.

This course also goes by the acronym GISMO, which stands for Graduate Instruction in Seismology with Matlab Objects.