{"id":2621,"date":"2024-07-09T06:52:52","date_gmt":"2024-07-09T10:52:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/matlab\/?p=2621"},"modified":"2024-07-09T06:53:13","modified_gmt":"2024-07-09T10:53:13","slug":"introducing-isc-earthquake-toolbox","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.mathworks.com\/matlab\/2024\/07\/09\/introducing-isc-earthquake-toolbox\/","title":{"rendered":"Introducing ISC Earthquake Toolbox"},"content":{"rendered":"
Today\u2019s guest blogger is Kostas Leptokaropoulos. Kostas is the MathWorks Geoscience Academic Discipline Manager, supporting Geoscience researchers and educators. In this blog, he describes his experience working as a researcher seismologist and introduces a new, open toolbox developed by the International Seismological Centre (ISC, England) that enables MATLAB users to work directly with ISC data in MATLAB.<\/span><\/div>

Beyond the Earthquake Catalogues Jungle: Transforming From Data Miner to Seismologist<\/span><\/h2>
With over a decade of experience as a seismologist, I've relied heavily on MATLAB for data processing, analysis, and, to some extent, visualization. However, this reliance didn't simplify my work entirely. The laborious tasks of importing, managing, and pre-processing seismic data consumed countless hours. Manually compiling global or regional data from multiple reporting agencies often led to inconsistencies and errors (lots of them!), requiring even more time for review and evaluation. Once finishing with all that, I barely remembered my initial scope and objectives! It felt like I was more data miner than researcher at times. Not to mention my hopeless efforts to write codes for somehow automating the process ...<\/span><\/div>
The recent release of the <\/span>ISC Earthquake Toolbox<\/span><\/a> adds an important tool for global earthquake parametric data management. The <\/span>International Seismological Centre<\/span><\/a> (ISC) holds more than 90 GB of unique earthquake data, recorded by ~17,000 seismic stations, reported by over 100 monitoring agencies. <\/span><\/div>
<\/span>\"\"<\/img><\/div>
Snapshot from search results in the ISC Bulletin, including event ID, source, focal coordinates, origin time and various magnitude types.<\/span><\/div>
The <\/span>ISC Earthquake Toolbox<\/span><\/a>, developed by Tom Garth, ISC, is now available to download for free from <\/span>File Exchange<\/span><\/a> and <\/span>GitHub<\/span><\/a>. Using <\/span>ISC Earthquake Toolbox<\/span><\/a>, geophysicists and seismologists can interactively access and visualize <\/span>ISC Bulletin<\/span><\/a> directly from MATLAB.<\/span><\/div>
\"ISC_gif.gif\"<\/img><\/div>
Introduction tutorial\/example to the ISC Toolbox, as a <\/span>live script<\/span><\/a> (.mlx) <\/span><\/div>
The toolbox relies on <\/span>MATLAB<\/span><\/a> and <\/span>Mapping Toolbox<\/span><\/a> to provide easy access, filtering, comparison, and visualization of earthquake data from the <\/span>ISC Bulletin<\/span><\/a>. You can also use the <\/span>ISC Earthquake Toolbox<\/span><\/a> to <\/span><\/div>