The Earth Model Collaboration (EMC): Improving the Earth Model Support, Discovery, and Access

The IRIS DMC Earth Model Collaboration (EMC) continues to improve its format, tools, and interfaces to facilitate community access to its rapidly growing repository of contributed Earth models. Since its inception in 2011, EMC's model portfolio has grown to over 145 contributed local, regional and global Earth models, including 127 velocity, 3 crustal thickness, 11 electric/resistivity, 2 attenuation, and 2 temperature models.

The self-describing NetCDF format remains the standard container for all EMC Earth models. This format has been expanded beyond the original NetCDF-3 classic format to include NetCDF-4 classic with compression for large models, 1D NetCDF for 1D reference Earth models, and support for models with projected coordinate systems.

The next generation of the earth-model web service is now in the beta stage. It utilizes an internal THREDDS Data Server* to access the catalog, metadata, and data of the models. Through this web service, users can programmatically access EMC models via its search, subsetting, and model information services. In addition, IRIS is in the process of upgrading and modernizing its model visualization and access tools in Python 3 that will also utilize the earth-model web service. These upgraded codes will be publicly available as interactive Python notebooks that allow users to run the codes iteratively while exploring and visualizing the Earth models.

Access to IRIS EMC is available at http://www.iris.edu/dms/products/emc.

Reference:

Schmandt, B. and E. Humphreys. 2010a. "Complex subduction and small-scale convection revealed by body-wave tomography of the western United States mantle." Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 297, 435-445, doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.epsl.2010.06.047.

* Unidata Thematic Real-time Environmental Distributed Data Services (THREDDS) Data Server (TDS). doi:https://doi.org/10.5065/D6N014KG.