Solid Earth Teaching and Research Environment

  1. Solid Earth Teaching and Research …
    1. Modules
      1. Geodynamics
      2. Seismology
      3. Visualization
    2. Contributors
      1. SEATREE design and coding
      2. Module contributors
    3. Publications and presentations
    4. Bug reports, feedback, and release history

SEATREE is a modular and user-friendly software to facilitate using solid Earth research tools in the classroom and for interdisciplinary, scientific collaboration. We use python wrappers and make use of modern software design concepts, while remaining compatible with traditional scientific coding. Our goals are to provide a fully contained, yet transparent package that lets users operate in an easy, graphically supported "black box" mode, while also allowing to look under the hood. In the long run, we envision SEATREE to contribute to new ways of sharing scientific research, and making (numerical) experiments truly reproducible again. (Eos Article)

SEATREE is module based, and the current release includes tools for computing mantle flow, for inverting for Earth structure by means of surface wave tomography, and a two-dimensional synthetic tomography case. Models for 3-D tomography and earthquake location are in the works. The main software design consists of transparent python wrappers that drive the modules, including a GMT plotting tool, and a graphical user interface.

SEATREE is freely available under the GNU license; a desktop installation is required to use SEATREE right now but we are planning on a web-based version as well. We encourage you to take the software for a test drive. If you want to use SEATREE in a classroom setting, we might be able to offer you some installation support and always welcome your feedback.

Screenshots Illustrations of the softwares capabilities and design concepts.

Download and installation Instructions on how to obtain and install the whole package.

User Documentation User-level documentation of SEATREE and the modules.

Developer Documentation Start here if you want to extend SEATREE and/or add modules.

Python Sandbox Programming tricks (for internal use)

Modules

The SEATREE graphical user interface and our python wrappers provide access to the following computational tools which are provided and shared by different groups of researchers.

Geodynamics

hc
A Hager & O'Connell (1981) mantle flow computation tool for spherical mantle circulation that allow computing flow velocities, tractions, and the geoid given different tomographic models.
conman
2D thermal convection module based on ConMan (under active development in SVN version)

Seismology

larry
a toolkit for performing 2-D, global, surface wave phase velocity tomography
Syn2D
a synthetic 2-D seismic tomography tool
Modules under development
  • larry3d: a toolkit for performing 3-D, global compressional body wave tomography for the Earth's mantle (full command line functionality, but not merged in SEATREE GUI yet)
  • nonlinloc: non linear earthquake relocations using NonLinLoc (initial stages)

Visualization

SEATREE provides access to different ways of visualization computational module output, some modules support more than one way of plotting results.

GMT
many modules use GMT for plotting geographic data (as for hc and larry), we wrote a simple python interface.
MatplotLib
Matlab-like output, used for syn2d and ConMan
MayaVi
Interactive 3-D output, in preparation

Contributors

SEATREE is being developed mainly by a USC Geodynamics team since the Fall of 2007 thanks to NSF CAREER funding and the additional support of the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.

SEATREE design and coding

  • Kevin Milner, Thorsten Becker, Hannah Waterhouse, and Jared Sain
  • design advice by Danijel Schorlemmer

Module contributors

Please see the individual module documentation for full references and copyright notices. In particular,

Publications and presentations

  • Milner, K., Becker, T. W., Boschi, L., Sain, J., Schorlemmer, D. and H. Waterhouse: The Solid Earth Research and Teaching Environment: a new software framework to share research tools in the classroom and across disciplines. Eos Trans. AGU, 90, 12, 2009. PDF
  • Waterhouse, H. D., K. Milner, T. W. Becker, J. Sain, and D. Schorlemmer: A Solid Earth Research and Teaching Environment, Opportunities and Challenges in Computational Geophysics workshop, Caltech, 2009. PDF

  • H.D. Waterhouse, K. Milner, and T.W. Becker: SEATREE: An Interactive Visual Environment for Earthquake Science, 2008 SCEC Annual Meeting, 1-007, 2008.

Bug reports, feedback, and release history

A version history can be found on the feedback page.