Speaking at the 2014 SciPy conference in Austin, TX this month, Joe Kington (now with Chevron) performed a geophysical fireworks display using nothing other than open source Python code. As a part of his PhD project at the University of Wisconsin, Kington was studying sedimentation and tectonics in the Nankai Trough, Japan. Kington found that the software used on interpretation workstations lacked the ability to produce display quality vector graphics for publication. Moreover, industry standard workstations are ‘walled gardens’ and it is hard to get data out into plotting or other data manipulation environments such as Python.
Kington rolled up his sleeves and reverse-engineered Geoprobe’s file formats and came up with ‘python-geoprobe,’ a python module to read and write horizons, volumes and faults. Once outside of Geoprobe, many high end functions can be achieved with a few lines of code—corendering coherence and amplitude, blending multiple data volumes and stratal slicing. Kington has it that data manipulation in Python makes it easier to get the interpreter’s point across. It is easy to do spectral decomp in Python and you can emulate tools like Geoteric or Voxelgeo in ‘just a few lines of code.’ The Python ecosystem provides common blocks for powerful seismic processing and imaging. Watch the SciPy talk and download python-geoprobe.
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