Project Focus

FISSURES-MATLAB Interface
by Qin Li, Ken Creager and Ronnie Ning
Department of Earth and Space Sciences
University of Washington

FISSURES-MATLAB Interface ( FMI ) is an interface between the FISSURES framework and MATLAB™. It allows MATLAB™ users to take advantage of the FISSURES framework to download and handle seismic data without knowing the details of FISSURES and java coding, and to easily build their own clients.

We define three Matlab classes each of which retrieve information from the IRIS DMC using the Data Handling Interface (DHI).  

• MatEvent retrieves, lists and maps earthquake hypocenters and magnitudes.
• MatNetwork retrieves network, station, and channel information.
• MatSeismogram retrieves and displays seismograms and basic station/channel information.

The get method is available with each class to return information in a set of MATLAB™ cell arrays and structures. The following applications and demo demonstrate the flexibility, simplicity and power these three classes:

• EventFinder is a Graphical User Interface to retrieve and make maps of hypocenter information from an earthquake catalog maintained at the IRIS DMC.
• SeisFinder is a Graphical User Interface to select an earthquake and retrieve and plot selected seismograms windowed with respect times of predicted phases.   Seismograms are retrieved from the DMC FARM and SPYDER® archives.
• SeisDemo is a very simple matlab script to retrieve earthquake hypocenters from the DMC and seismograms from the FARM.

These codes run on Sun Solaris, Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows. These codes will be available for beta testing by the end of October, 2003. More robust versions will be available for distribution in early 2004. A more complete description of the interface and applications will appear in the next IRIS DMC newsletter.