The Generic Mapping Tools (GMT) is a powerful package for manipulating geographic and Cartesian datasets and producing high-quality maps and plots. The official GMT 6.0.0 version was released on November 1st, 2019 and it differs from the former versions with new modern mode style and more simple syntax.

Seismology is a subject that builds on observations, and in recent decades both the data volume and types have increased dramatically. Thus in addition to the principles, students also need to be skilled at processing data and extracting useful information. This tutorial shows how to visualize the data using some basic GMT commands as well as data retrieving methods. This tutorial bridges the gap between the theoretical courses and practical problems and inspires students.

Link to download tutorial materials.

The tutorial includes introduction to seismic waves, example seismograms in SAC format and Matlab codes to read in seismogram in SAC format and illustrate the waveform, and to derive Fourier transform and S transform and plot spectrogram.

The first aim of this tutorial is to plot and view seismic waves, and learn to recognize different types of seismic waves, including P wave, S wave, and surface waves. The second aim is to view the frequency differences between different seismic waves by conducting spectral analysis of seismograms. Recognizing seismograms and knowing their features are the bases of the seismology course.

Link to download tutorial materials.

This section aims to introduce the earthquake relocation by using the HypoInverse and HypoDD programs. The precise location of an earthquake is one of the most important and classical tasks in practical Seismology. Knowing the precise location of earthquakes is of great importance in terms of the analysis of seismic nucleation, seismogenic faults distribution, and seismic hazards estimation and mitigation.

Tools used in this section include HypoInverse program, HypoDD program, and GMT package. Hypoinverse is a computer program that processes files of seismic station data for an earthquake (like P wave arrival times and seismogram amplitudes and durations) into earthquake locations and magnitudes (Klein, 2002). It is a single event location method. The HypoDD program (Waldhauser and Ellsworth, 2000) considers that the difference in travel times for two events observed at one station can be attributed to the spatial offset between the events with high accuracy, thus could provide accurate relative positions of a series earthquakes. The GMT package is used to plot the relocation result.

Link to download tutorial materials.