ObsPy: A Python Toolbox for Seismology - Recent Developments and Applications

Abstract:

ObsPy (http://www.obspy.org) is a community-driven, open-source project dedicated to building a bridge for seismology into the scientific Python ecosystem. It offers

a) read and write support for essentially all commonly used waveform, station, and event metadata file formats with a unified interface,

b) a comprehensive signal processing toolbox tuned to the needs of seismologists,

c) integrated access to all large data centers, web services and databases, and

d) convenient wrappers to legacy codes like libtau and evalresp.

Python, currently the most popular language for teaching introductory computer science courses at top-ranked U.S. departments, is a full-blown programming language with the flexibility of an interactive scripting language. Its extensive standard library and large variety of freely available high quality scientific modules cover most needs in developing scientific processing workflows.

Together with packages like NumPy, SciPy, Matplotlib, IPython, Pandas, lxml, and PyQt, ObsPy enables the construction of complete workflows in Python. These vary from reading locally stored data or requesting data from one or more different data centers through to signal analysis and data processing and on to visualizations in GUI and web applications, output of modified/derived data and the creation of publication-quality figures.

ObsPy enjoys a large world-wide rate of adoption in the community. Applications successfully using it include time-dependent and rotational seismology, big data processing, event relocations, and synthetic studies about attenuation kernels and full-waveform inversions to name a few examples. All functionality is extensively documented and the ObsPy tutorial and gallery give a good impression of the wide range of possible use cases.
We will present the basic features of ObsPy, new developments and applications, and a roadmap for the near future and discuss the sustainability of our open-source development model.