ObsPy - A Python Toolbox for Seismology - and Applications

Recent years witnessed the evolution of Python's ecosystem into one of the most powerful and productive scientific environments across disciplines. ObsPy (https://www.obspy.org) is a fully community driven, open-source project dedicated to provide a bridge for seismology into that ecosystem. It is a Python toolbox offering:

Read and write support for essentially every commonly used data format in seismology with a unified interface and automatic format detection. This includes waveform data (MiniSEED, SAC, SEG-Y, Reftek, …) as well as station (SEED, StationXML, SC3ML, …) and event meta information (QuakeML, ZMAP, …).

Integrated access to the largest data centers, web services, and real-time data streams (FDSNWS, ArcLink, SeedLink, ...).

A powerful signal processing toolbox tuned to the specific needs of seismologists.

Utility functionality like travel time calculations with the TauP method, geodetic functions, and data visualizations.

ObsPy has been in constant development for more than eight years and is developed and used by scientists around the world with successful applications in all branches of seismology. Additionally it nowadays serves as the foundation for a large number of more specialized packages. Newest features include:

Full interoperability of SEED and StationXML/Inventory objects

Access to the Nominal Response Library (NRL) for easy and quick creation of station metadata from scratch

Support for the IRIS Federated Catalog Service

Improved performance of the EarthWorm client

Several improvements to MiniSEED read/write module

Improved plotting capabilities for PPSD (spectrograms, PSD of discrete frequencies over time, ..)

Support for..

Reading ArcLink Inventory XML

Reading Reftek data format

Writing SeisComp3 ML (SC3ML)

Writing StationTXT format

This presentation will give a short overview of the capabilities of ObsPy and point out several representative or new use cases and show-case some projects that are based on ObsPy, e.g.:

seismo-live.org

Seedlink-plotter

MSNoise, and others..