Jupyter Notebooks for Earth Sciences: An Interactive Training Platform for Seismology

We have initiated a community platform (http://www.seismo-live.org) where Python-based Jupyter notebooks (https://jupyter.org) can be accessed and run without necessary downloads or local software installations. The increasingly popular Jupyter notebooks allow the combination of markup language, graphics, and equations with interactive, executable Python code examples. Jupyter notebooks are a powerful and easy-to-grasp tool for students to develop entire projects, scientists to collaborate and efficiently interchange evolving workflows, and trainers to develop efficient practical material. Utilizing the tmpnb project (https://github.com/jupyter/tmpnb), we link the power of Jupyter notebooks with an underlying server, such that notebooks can be run from anywhere, even on smart phones. We demonstrate the potential with notebooks for 1) learning the programming language Python, 2) basic signal processing, 3) an introduction to the ObsPy library (https://obspy.org) for seismology, 4) seismic noise analysis, 5) an entire suite of notebooks for computational seismology (the finite-difference method, pseudospectral methods, finite/spectral element methods, the finite-volume and the discontinuous Galerkin methods, Instaseis), 6) rotational seismology, 7) making results in papers fully reproducible, 8) a rate-and-state friction toolkit, 9) glacial seismology. The platform is run as a community project using Github. Submission of complementary Jupyter notebooks is encouraged. Extension in the near future include linear(-ized) and nonlinear inverse problems.