This short tutorial demonstrates how to perform a global seismic wave simulation on Earth and how to work with seismological community data formats within Salvus.
Fully 3-D global seismic waveform simulations can be amongst the biggest numerical simulations. Across all sciences. In many cases you might not have enough computational power available to run things you would like to run. Seismologists spent many decades on developing approximate methods using various simplifications and it might be worthwhile searching the literature for these.
That being said - there is of course merit in these simulations and performing these is one of the reasons why Salvus was originally created. Salvus itself supports a number of these but this is not the topic of this tutorial.
A good rule of thumb is to try to use about 5000 4th order elements in 3-D per rank/process. Thus a simulation with 1 million elements already requires a machine/cluster with about 200 cores.
Another thing to note is that these simulations scale with highest simulated frequency to the 4th power. Thus doubling the frequency results in 16 times the simulation costs.
We will run a simulation of the 2011 Tohoku-Oki earthquake and record it at receivers from the global seismological network (GSN). Because we want to run this on a laptop we will run this at periods of 4000 seconds. This is of course completely impractical for any real world simulation but it demonstrates how to use Salvus and the computation actually finishes in a few seconds.
One of Salvus' best features is its scalability. Changing a single variable (period
here) and re-running the whole notebook could also be used to run realistic and large-scale simulations.
Steps we will perform:
- Build a cubed-sphere mesh of the whole Earth.
- Build a source object for the Tohoku-Oki earthquake.
- Download receiver information for GSN stations from the IRIS DMC data center.
- Assemble all that information into a waveform simulation object.
- Actually run that simulation.
- Look at the data.
Aside from Salvus, this tutorial requires the pyasdf
and obspy
Python libraries which can be installed either via pip
or via conda
.