Week 3: Slowly but surely
June 21st, 2013
This week has been my most challenging so far, but I’ve definitely learned a lot. Dr. Pavlis was away at a workshop this week, leaving Bradley and I to fend for ourselves for a few days, so I took this as an opportunity to really get comfortable with Unix and the structure of the database we are working with. With the help of Dr. Gilbert (and Google), I worked on some raw data processing in Unix to get our waveform data which we collected from the field last week into a form that we can actually work with. First, I had to merge the miniseed data files into the directory containing the OIINK 2013 data. Once this was done, I was able to rebuild the 2013 “wfdisc” which contains all of the waveform data in a nicely organized text document. At this stage, the data is now prepared and ready to be manipulated further by other programs. I tried really hard to make this all sound impressive but in reality, all I had to do was edit some scripts to do most of the work for me. With that being said, I’m a complete noob to Unix, and this took me over a day to do. Just trying to maneuver my way around the database, figure out the scripts, and NOT accidently delete all of our newly acquired data was a task in its own. The good news is that I feel much more comfortable with Unix and moving data remotely between the computers.
Now that Dr. Pavlis is back, I’m beginning to get into the real data processing for my project. The programs I’ll mainly be using are SAC, Matlab, respknt, pwaveqn, ParaView, and others I probably don’t know about yet. I’ll be using Matlab to make the initial velocity models. Then I’ll run the velocity models through respknt which calculates the earth’s response to the incoming waves. Next I run pwaveqn to deconvolve the earth response into receiver functions and use SAC to plot the receiver functions. This leaves me with synthetic receiver functions that I can compare with the “real data”. As for the real data, I’m not completely sure how the processing works yet, but I know that I’ll be using Matlab to pick the best traces and make stacks for each of the stations. Once all of my data is processed, I’ll be converting the files into ParaView compatible files for 3D visualization. I played around with ParaView a little and it’s an amazing tool! I’ll have to post pictures once I get my final model.
Food update: Last night Bradley and I ate at a local pizza place called Mother Bear’s. We had heard that it was pretty good, but it was actually amazing! We got the “Straits of Gibraltar” which was made with olive tapenade, mozzarella, banana peppers, red onions, fresh spinach, and feta… Probably the best tasting pizza I’ve ever consumed.
Tonight, I was wandering around the campus and noticed people flocking towards the eastern part so I decided to see what was going on. It turned out, the IU Art Museum was having live music by an R&B/funk/blues band called The Dynamics. Although I was one of the few people under the age of 40, it was pretty cool. It was outside on the rooftop by some interesting sculptures and there was free food so naturally, I indulged. The food was good, the music even better; I’d call it a successful night.
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