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VISUALIZING THE SEISMIC WAVEFIELD
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Wavefield visualizations provide unprecedented illustrations of seismic waves propagating across the continental United States and have become a very popular IRIS data product that is used in a wide variety of settings. The visualizations are presented as movies, and are created by plotting data from the USArray Transportable Array stations (and other nearby stations) as a function of time. Symbols are plotted at the station locations, and change color depending on the intensity of up or down vertical motion recorded at the station at a given instant in time. Combining many sequential time steps into a movie provides a direct visualization of seismic data in time and space. The original visualization concept (developed by Chuck Ammon at Penn State University) has been developed into a standard product at the DMC. The visualizations are heavily used as teaching tools, as they easily convey the characteristics of long-period seismic wave propagation. The visualizations have been used in classrooms ranging from grade school to graduate level as they contain features and subtleties that reward careful observation by all levels of viewers.</p>