Getting started with Obspy: Downloading waveform data (codes included)
Obspy is an open-source Python framework developed for the processing of seismological data. In this post, I will introduce how to use Obspy along with some ...
Seismology & Geophysics Tutorials
Learn from seismic data, one workflow at a time. Practical tutorials for students and researchers in seismology and geophysics. Start with ObsPy and waveform quality, work through signal processing and earthquake inference, or explore machine-learning pickers and monitoring workflows. Choose a path for your next class project, analysis, or research question.
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Start with observations
Waveform data & ObsPy
Get seismic data onto your machine, inspect its metadata, and make your first waveform and noise plots.
- Download and save waveforms with ObsPy
- Plot a record section across stations
- Inspect station noise with PPSD
Basic Python helps. The examples introduce seismic file formats and station metadata.
Understand the methods
Signals & earthquake inference
Connect frequency-domain processing to inverse problems, sampling, and earthquake-location uncertainty.
- Explore Fourier analysis and filtering
- Build intuition for MCMC with Python
- Understand probabilistic location with NonLinLoc
Worked examples and method guides. Familiarity with arrays and basic probability helps.
Explore research workflows
Seismic ML & monitoring
See how picking fits into a catalog pipeline, try a pretrained model, and assess learned waveform representations.
- Follow a modern seismic monitoring pipeline
- Pick P and S arrivals with SeisBench
- Explore autoencoders for seismic waveforms
Build on waveform basics. Check model assumptions and evaluate results on your own research data.
Build your research toolkit
New to scientific Python? Start with NumPy arrays and vectorization. For figures and maps, explore PyGMT topographic mapping and the plotting collection. Find supporting files in tools and downloads, or get new Earth Inversion tutorials by email.
Featured geoscience tutorials
Visualizing power spectral density using Obspy in Python (codes included)
Short demonstration of the ppsd class defined in Obspy using 3 days of data for station PB-B075
Markov Chain Monte Carlo for Geoscientists
An intuitive guide to MCMC: a walker in the fog whose footprints map the posterior. We build a Metropolis sampler from scratch, check it against an exact ana...
Probabilistic Earthquake Location with NonLinLoc
How NonLinLoc locates earthquakes by mapping a full probability density over the search volume instead of iterating to a single point — the Bayesian idea, th...
Automatic P/S Phase Picking with Deep Learning Using SeisBench
Load a waveform with ObsPy, run a pre-trained PhaseNet (or EQTransformer) model from SeisBench, and plot the picked P and S arrivals — a hands-on bridge from...
Autoencoders for Seismic Waveforms: Compress, Learn, and Generate
Autoencoders learn compact representations by reconstructing seismic data. This tutorial explains their use in compression, denoising, representation learnin...
All posts on this track (100)
Prefer one chronological stream of everything? See all recent posts.
2026 9
From GitHub to Zenodo: Make Your Code and Data Citable
Turn a GitHub release into a citable research archive, share supporting data, and choose the right DOI for your paper.
Autoencoders for Seismic Waveforms: Compress, Learn, and Generate
Autoencoders learn compact representations by reconstructing seismic data. This tutorial explains their use in compression, denoising, representation learnin...
When Frequency Changes Signal Structural Damage
An unexpected drop in a building’s natural frequency is the structure reporting that it has lost stiffness — usually the first sign of damage. Here is why to...
From Phase Pickers to Seismic Foundation Models
Foundation models ask whether one pretrained representation of seismic waveforms can support picking, detection, classification, and other downstream tasks—w...
Automatic P/S Phase Picking with Deep Learning Using SeisBench
Load a waveform with ObsPy, run a pre-trained PhaseNet (or EQTransformer) model from SeisBench, and plot the picked P and S arrivals — a hands-on bridge from...
Markov Chain Monte Carlo for Geoscientists
An intuitive guide to MCMC: a walker in the fog whose footprints map the posterior. We build a Metropolis sampler from scratch, check it against an exact ana...
Probabilistic Earthquake Location with NonLinLoc
How NonLinLoc locates earthquakes by mapping a full probability density over the search volume instead of iterating to a single point — the Bayesian idea, th...
Modern Seismic Monitoring Systems: How ML and the Cloud Build Earthquake Catalogs
A tour of how modern earthquake-monitoring systems turn continuous seismic waveforms into earthquake catalogs — the ML pipeline of picking, association, and ...
SeismoAlert: A real-time earthquake monitoring toolkit in Python (codes included)
I built SeismoAlert to fetch USGS earthquake data, run statistical analysis, detect anomalies, and generate interactive maps from a single CLI.
2025 1
The Need for Structural Health Monitoring in the San Francisco Bay Area
The San Francisco Bay Area combines high seismic hazard, dense urban exposure, and aging infrastructure. Structural Health Monitoring can improve post-earthq...
2024 9
The Impact of Cloud Computing on Geophysical and Seismological Research
Cloud computing is transforming geophysical and seismological research by enabling scalable processing, faster collaboration, and reproducible workflows for ...
Understanding Docker: A Beginner’s Guide for Geophysics Students
A practical introduction to Docker for geophysics students, including images, containers, volumes, and a simple workflow for reproducible seismic data analys...
Solving a Toy Earthquake Location Problem Using a Genetic Algorithm
Discover how Genetic Algorithms can be applied to solve the earthquake location problem in seismology. This post walks through generating synthetic seismic d...
Integrating MEMS Accelerometers and Broadband Seismometers: Challenges and Opportunities in Modern Seismology
While MEMS accelerometers offer advantages in cost, size, and deployment flexibility compared to traditional broadband seismometers, they face limitations in...
Understanding MEMS Accelerometers
While MEMS accelerometers offer advantages in cost, size, and deployment flexibility compared to traditional broadband seismometers, they face limitations in...
Cosmic Whispers: Scientists Detect Universe-Wide Gravitational Wave Background
Scientists have found compelling evidence for low-frequency gravitational waves permeating the entire universe, opening a new window into cosmic phenomena. T...
Structural Health Monitoring Using Low-Cost Sensors and Wireless Networks
The advent of low-cost Microelectromechanical Systems (MEMS) sensors has revolutionized Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) of buildings, enabling cost-effect...
RabbitMQ for Seismic Waveforms: Enabling Reliable Data Communication
Learn how to use RabbitMQ with Python to publish and consume seismic waveform messages reliably in real time for distributed seismology workflows.
Understanding the Metropolis-Hastings Algorithm: A Step-by-Step Guide with Python Examples
The Metropolis-Hastings algorithm is a cornerstone of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods, enabling us to generate samples from complex probability distr...
2023 3
Exploring the Multi-Taper Method: A Robust Approach for Time-Frequency Analysis
Explore the Multi-Taper Method’s unique ability to refine spectral estimates in seismology. Leveraging multiple orthogonal tapers, this approach minimizes va...
How to plot great circle path through your region using PyGMT
In this article, we will learn how to visualize the great circle paths that traverse a designated region of interest using PyGMT. Understanding these paths i...
How to read a scientific research paper using a large language model?
Python script to read a PDF document, and perform question-answering on the document, and to generate an output based on the provided query
2022 6
How to plot the boundaries of the states on the basemap of the USA
We will plot the boundaries of the states of the USA on a basemap figure
Read YAML input file in BASH, C/C++ and Python
We will see how to read a YAML file in Bash, C/C++ and Python.
Threading in C/C++ programming language using pthreads
Using multiple threads in C for concurrent process flow
Numerical optimization based on the L-BFGS method
We will inspect the L-BFGS optimization method using one example and compare its performance with the gradient descent method
A Quick Overview on Geospatial Data Visualization using PyGMT
We will see how to plot a topographic map, overlay earthquake data on topographic maps, plot focal mechanism solutions and plot tomographic results on a geog...
How to read tabular data from a text file in Fortran
A step-by-step Fortran program to read a formatted tabular Earth-model file — count the rows, allocate arrays, then read the columns and find the discontinui...
2021 39
How to deal with irregularly sampled time series data
While analyzing time series data, we often come across data that is non-uniformly sampled, i.e., they have non-equidistant time-steps. Infact, most of the re...
How to plot earthquakes data on a three-dimensional topographic map
Read the earthquake data from a data file and overlay on a three-dimensional topographic map using PyGMT.
Using dask Python library to read a huge global earthquake catalog file
We will see how we can read a large data file with earthquake catalog in Python using the Dask library
Convolution of waveforms using Python compared to MATLAB
We will see compare the convolution functions in Python (Numpy) with the conv function in MATLAB. If you have tried them both then you would know that its no...
Maximum likelihood estimation for the regression parameters
We will learn the basics of the maximum likelihood method, and then apply it on a regression problem. We will also compare it with the least-squares estimati...
Solving boundary value problems using the shooting method
The boundary value problems require information at the present time and a future time. We will see how we can use shooting method to solve problems where we ...
Efficiently compute spectrogram for large dataset in python
Librosa can efficiently compute the spectrogram for large time series data in seconds. We will use that to plot the spectrogram using matplotlib
How to overlay shapefile data on PyGMT Maps
We learn how to plot selected shapefile data using geopandas on top of PyGMT maps
Numerically solving initial value problems using the Runge-Kutta method
Runge-Kutta methods are most popular method to solve ordinary differential equations (ODEs) with a better approximation than the Euler method. We compare the...
Numerically solving initial value problems using the Euler method
The simplest algorithm to solve a system of differential equations is the Euler method. We understand the Euler method by looking into a simple heat transfer...
How to plot Shear-wave splitting measurements using PyGMT
How you can plot the shear-wave splitting measurements from splitting database using PyGMT.
How to extract station data from the web page
Uses pandas to read the html page and extract the html data into pandas dataframe
How to plot the earthquakes data on a topographic map
Read the earthquake data from a csv file and overlay on a topographic map using PyGMT.
How to automatically enquire the availability of seismic data using Obspy
In this post, we will see how can we retrive the available seismic waveforms information for a given network, station, channel and client in a given period o...
How to implement the iterative Newton–Raphson method to find roots of a function in Python
The Newton–Raphson method (commonly known as Newton’s method) is developed for finding roots of a given function or polynomial iteratively. We show two examp...
How effective is the signal denoising using the MATLAB based wavelet analysis
We see how to download seismic waveforms, convert them into mat format from mini-seed and then perform denoising using wavelet analysis. We first performed w...
Towards multi-resolution analysis with wavelet transform
We will learn the basic concepts of wavelet tranform and multi-resolution analysis starting from the Fourier Transform, and Gabor Transform.
Empirical Orthogonal Function analysis to inspect the spatial coherency in the geospatial data (codes included)
Empirical Orthogonal Functions analysis decomposes the continuous space-time field into a set of orthogonal spatial patterns along with a set of associated u...
Concatenating daily seismic traces into one MiniSeed File (codes included)
I concatenate the daily seismic traces for 15 days into one miniseed file for further analysis. Then I obtained the spectrogram of the 15 days seismic data. ...
Computing cross-correlation and spectrogram of two seismic traces (codes included)
Read the seismic traces from the miniseed files and compute the cross-correlation and spectrogram
Principal Component Analysis To Decompose Signals and Reduce Dimensionality (codes included)
Use Principal Component Analysis (via SVD) to decompose a space-time signal into a few dominant modes and reduce its dimensionality, with Python code.
Signal denoising using Fourier Analysis in Python (codes included)
We will learn the basics of Fourier analysis and implement it to remove noise from the synthetic and real signals
Analyzing MiniSEED seismic data in MATLAB (codes included)
We will learn how to convert a mseed data file into mat format and then read and analyze it using MATLAB
Transfer learning applied on the unsplash data using alexnet pretrained network (codes included)
Transfer learning using the pre-trained deep learning networks from MATLAB can be easily implemented to achieve fast and impressive results
Getting familiar with PyTorch data structures (codes included)
In this introduction to the concepts of Pytorch data structures, we will learn about how to create and reshape tensors using Pytorch and compare it with the ...
How to start using Pandas immediately for Earth Data Analysis (codes included)
This tutorial gives a brief description of scientific computing using Pandas by introducing Series, DataFrame, Pandas common operations, methods, conditional...
A quick look into the Sktime for time-series forecasting (codes included)
I used the sktime library to forecast the airline data using NaiveForecaster, KNeighborsRegressor, Statistical forecasters, and auto ARIMA model.
Three-dimensional perspective map of Taiwan using GMT and PyGMT (codes included)
We learn how to make the three-dimensional map using both GMT and PyGMT
Wavelet analysis applied to the real dataset in a quick and easy way (codes included)
An introduction to the wavelet analysis for a real geophysical data set. I compared the analysis to the Fourier analysis. Codes included!
High-quality maps using the modern interface to the Generic Mapping Tools (codes included)
GMT or generic mapping tools have become synonymous with plotting maps in Earth, Ocean, and Planetary sciences. It can be used for processing data, generatin...
Genetic Algorithm: a highly robust inversion scheme for geophysical applications (codes included)
An introduction to the basics of genetic algorithm along with a simple numerical example and solution of an earthquake location problem
Genetic Algorithm: a highly robust inversion scheme for geophysical applications
An introduction to the basics of genetic algorithm along with a simple numerical example and solution of an earthquake location problem
The easy way to compute and visualize the time & frequency domain correlation (codes included)
In geophysics, it is important to understand and identify the complex and unknown relationships between two time-series. Cross-correlation is an established ...
Monte Carlo methods and earthquake location problem (codes included)
The common geophysical problems most often have multimodal objective function with many possible minima. In this post, we will look into the Monte Carlo meth...
Plotting a record section using Obspy (codes included)
Quickly plot record section of a stream using Obspy. I will introduce you how to make a stream from a set of SAC data, plot the record section and store it a...
Build a Flask Web Application: Sea Level Rise Monitoring (codes included)
This post gives a quick introduction on how to build a web application using Flask and deploy on Heroku server. Then, I share my codes for building advanced ...
Write ASCII data to MSEED file using Obspy (codes included)
In this post, I will read a ASCII file whose first few lines contains the header information and then the three-component data. I will read using the pandas ...
Least-Squares Method in Geosciences (codes included)
Least-squares method is a popular approach in geophysical inversion to estimate the parameters of a postulated Earth model from given observations. This meth...
Speed-up your codes by parallel computing in Python (codes included)
Parallel computing is quickly becoming a necessity. Modern computers comes with more than one process and we most often only use single process to do most of...
2020 30
Time-Frequency Analysis in MATLAB (codes included)
A signal has one or more frequency components in it and can be viewed from two different standpoints: time-domain and frequency domain. In general, signals a...
Hypothesis test for the significance of linear trend using the Monte Carlo simulations (codes included)
We pose a null hypothesis and enquire that given that the null hypothesis is true, how likely is the observed pattern of results? This likelihood is known as...
How to avoid common mistakes in analyzing correlations of two time-series
Most often data analyst consider correlation between two time-series as a causation effect. Two time-series are correlated that does not imply that one cause...
Estimation of the degrees of freedom for time series (codes included)
Numerical tests to understand the degrees of freedom in time series
Numerical tests for seismic resolution (codes included)
Seismic resolution and fidelity are the two important measures of the quality of the seismic record and the seismic images. Seismic resolution quantifies the...
Locating Earthquakes using Geiger’s Method (codes included)
Simple earthquake location problem and its solution using Geiger’s method
Exploratory Factor Analysis (codes included)
Factor Analysis is an exploratory data analysis method used to search influential underlying factors or latent variables from a set of observed variables
Working with Obspy and Basemap (codes included)
This post is aimed to resolve the issues regarding the conflicts of using obspy and basemap libraries together.
Time Series Analysis in Geophysics (codes included)
Time-series analysis is essential in most fields of science, including geophysics, economics, etc. Most of the geophysical data comes in a time-series format...
GMT tutorial for beginners (codes included)
The Generic Mapping Tools is widely used across Earth and Planetary and other fields of studies to process data and generate high-quality illustrations. This...
Getting started with Obspy: Downloading waveform data (codes included)
Obspy is an open-source Python framework developed for the processing of seismological data. In this post, I will introduce how to use Obspy along with some ...
Simple wave modeling and Hilbert Transform in Matlab (codes included)
We demonstrate how to model a simple wave, obtain its frequencies, apply Hilbert transform, and perform edge detection
Writing NetCDF4 Data using Python (codes included)
NetCDF file format has been designed for storing multidimensional scientific data such as temperature, rainfall, humidity, etc. In this post, we will see how...
Time Series Analysis in Python: Filtering or Smoothing Data (codes included)
In this post, we will see how we can use Python to low-pass filter the 10 year long daily fluctuations of GPS time series. We need to use the “Scipy” package...
Reading NetCDF4 Data in Python (codes included)
In Earth Sciences, we often deal with multidimensional data structures such as climate data, GPS data. It ‘s hard to save such data in text files as it would...
PyGMT: High-Resolution Topographic Map in Python (codes included)
A hands-on tutorial on plotting a high-resolution topographic map in Python with PyGMT — built up one layer at a time, with interactive checks.
Plotting seismograms with increasing epicentral distance using Python (codes included)
Short demostration of how to plot the distance vs seismic waveforms and mark the P and S arrival times using the IASP91 earth model. Codes are included.
Plotting track and trajectory of tropical cyclones on a topographic map in Python (codes included)
Short demonstration of how to plot the track or trajectory of a hurricane on a map. Codes are included.
Visualizing power spectral density using Obspy in Python (codes included)
Short demonstration of the ppsd class defined in Obspy using 3 days of data for station PB-B075
Automatically Plotting Record Section for an Earthquake in the Given Time Range in Python (codes included)
Python code to automatically plot the record section for the highest magnitude earthquake in the given time range
![Numerical Tests on Travel Time Tomography [MATLAB]](https://earthinversion.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/tomographyModel1.jpg)
Numerical Tests on Travel Time Tomography [MATLAB]
Introduction to the concepts of tomography with equations and codes. Introduction to the concepts of overdetermined, underdetermined and mix-determined probl...
Monte Carlo Simulation to test for the correlation between two dataset in MATLAB (codes included)
We test for the correlation coefficients or the covariance between two sets of random numbers selected from normal distribution using the Monte Carlo simulat...
Easy Statistical Analysis using the tools of MATLAB (codes included)
Visualize the statistics of the data using MATLAB: mean, median, std, interquartile range, skewness, kurtosis, t-statistic, degrees of freedom
Hypothesis Test in MATLAB (codes included)
Using Randomization to test the disprove the null hypothesis
Topographic map clipped by coastlines in Python (codes included)
This post demonstrate how to use Python to set up clip topographic map based on coastlines.
Topographic map with shading in Python (codes included)
Generating GMT style shaded relief map in Python
Plotting the geospatial data clipped by coastlines in Python (codes included)
In geosciences, we most frequently have to make geospatial plots, but the available data is unevenly distributed and irregular. We like to show the data, in ...
How to plot topographic station map in Python (codes included)
We read the station information from a file to plot the 1 arc-minute relief map
Non-linear curve fitting to a model with multiple observational variables in MATLAB (codes included)
How to fit data to non-linear model
Plotting 1 arc-minute global relief map in Python (codes included)
Plotting 1 arc-minute topographic map in python
2019 3
Estimation of the degrees of freedom of time series in Python (codes included)
Two time series with predominant linear trends (very low DOF) can have a very high correlation coefficient, which can hardly be construed as an evidence for ...
GMT Advanced Tutorial, Part II (codes included)
Plotting publishable quality maps using generic mapping tools (GMT)
GMT Advanced Tutorial (codes included)
Plotting publishable quality maps using generic mapping tools (GMT)
Geoscientist who codes?
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