New Mexico Tech
Earth and Environmental Science

ERTH 401 / GEOP 501 - Computational Methods & Tools

Lab 9: Use all the tools

Until now we've mainly given you small tasks to work on so you get a feeling for the various tools at your disposal. For this lab we want to move more towards free-form exercises. Your tasks is, with your class project in mind, to work on some of your own (or your advisor's) data with the existing tools that we talked about so far. Some examples could be:

• Set up a data processing pipeline: input some data file, work out some statistics on one or more data sets (e.g., columns) in that file, create a figure that plots data and statistics. This could involve shell and python tools
• Write a script that downloads data from somewhere on the internet, stores it in a logical way locally, maybe creates a figure from these data (stores the figure, too)
• Identify a subset of samples / stations by their location and plot them on a map (checkout matplotlib's basemap).
• Do some Earth-science related calculations and plot up results. For example:
  • look up equations for both g and pressure as a function of depth in a basic geophysics textbook, program the equations using python tools, and plots g and P as a function of depth.
  • Develop a model for the likely trajectory of a volcanic bomb.
• Develop a script to do linear regression on a given dataset that you read it. Plot the data, best-fit line, and statistics for that line.
• Find an area of interest, find the seismic stations that exist in that area, download seismograms for those stations for a given time period or specific earthquake, and plot the time series data. You should explore other tools for this, such as obspy.

When framing your mini-project for this lab, be sure to identify sub-tasks (remember the blocks in the flow charts) that you can work on separately and test in isolation. That way you don't end up with a giant monolith that you'll need to debug all at once. Work on each task until it functions the way you want to and then move along until you can put it all together.

Think very hard about using this as an opportunity to make progress toward your class project. It would be useful to actually make a flow chart that visualizes the task you're trying to accomplish. Generating some sort of figure would help, too, as it could occupy space on the poster you'll present at the end.

As deliverable for this lab, send your well-commented code with a well-described test data set and instructions on how to run this. Include figures (.png, .pdf, .jpg) if you create any. If you run into problems you can't solve, describe in detail what you want to accomplish, identify the segments of code that fail, what you've tried to solve the problem, and tell us why you think it doesn't work. Have fun!