Author: Martin H. Trauth

Shortly after this blog went online, I wrote down a short history of the MRES book. Here is an update, just before the 5th edition is published. The book has become heavy, it has twice the number of pages as the first edition! Continue reading “The Story of the MRES Book, Editions 1–5”

The increasing spread of mobile internet devices with built-in accelerometers led to the idea of using them to build up low-cost seismological arrays. This exercises demonstrates how to log, import and display smartphone accelerometer measurements with MATLAB.

Unfortunately, the graphical output of the function spectrogram has changed in a way that it can no longer be used by geoscientists. Here is a way around the problem. Continue reading “Change of Behaviour: spectrogram”

The 5th edition of MATLAB Recipes for Earth Sciences now has a book cover and can already be pre-ordered on the publisher’s webpage. The picture on the top is a 3D display of a filtered SRTM elevation data set of the Baringo area in Kenya, showing fault escarpments and lake basins. The function surfl has been used to generate a shaded-relief map with simulated lighting, contour3 to create white elevation contours and the demcmap colormap from the Mapping Toolbox.

There is disagreement among scientists as to whether graphics should be presented in an attractive design or whether the standard design of the statistical software is sufficient. Here is a comparison of a graphic as generated by MATLAB with an improved design. Continue reading “Create Publishable Graphics with MATLAB, Part 2”

The following exercise is intended to help to understand the measurement of the orientation of linear and planar structures in the field, using the magnetometer and the gyroscope of the smartphone. We will carry out a large number of repeated measurement, not possible with a traditional compass in a reasonable time. These repeated measurements will be statistically evaluated and interpreted with regard to their accuracy and precision.