The SCEC GMSV Toolkit: Open-Source Tools for Ground Motion Simulation Processing and Validation

Fabio Silva, Christine A. Goulet, Philip J. Maechling, & Yehuda Ben-Zion

Published September 10, 2023, SCEC Contribution #12787, 2023 SCEC Annual Meeting Poster #171 (PDF)

The Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC) Ground Motion Simulation Validation (GMSV) software Toolkit aims to provide standardized and verified tools to a broad seismological and engineering community of researchers interested in ground motion simulations and their validation. The GMSV Toolkit leverages over a decade of scientific, engineering, and software development work completed by dozens of contributors, with software components coming from the SCEC Broadband Platform (BBP) and from a complementary, but independent, seismogram processing software distribution (TS Process). While the GMSV Toolkit includes basic seismogram processing tools, its functionality is focused on the uniform re-processing of recorded and/or simulated seismograms to allow 1) one-to-one comparisons in time and frequency domains, and 2) statistical computations of various validation metrics.

Each code included in the GMSV Toolkit was redesigned to work in a standalone package so that its full capabilities are accessible for the validation of any simulated seismograms, without the need to install other software. For each code packaged in the GMSV Toolkit, we include both a command-line interface and a Python API. Each tool can therefore be run directly from the shell, allowing codes to be scripted together in a user-specified way, or with the Python API for use with other Python programs. We preserve full compatibility with the original codes from the BBP, and reproduce metric computation, statistics, and plot results obtained in previous BBP studies.

The GMSV Toolkit comes with extensive training material and tutorials in Jupyter notebook format, containing step-by-step, detailed examples of different validation cases, selected to provide starting templates that users can modify with customized settings. The GMSV Toolkit is distributed with a BSD-3 open-source license on GitHub, and its software development follows current practices regarding version control, test coverage, documentation, and verification examples.

Key Words
Ground Motions, Simulations, Open-Source, Validation Tools

Citation
Silva, F., Goulet, C. A., Maechling, P. J., & Ben-Zion, Y. (2023, 09). The SCEC GMSV Toolkit: Open-Source Tools for Ground Motion Simulation Processing and Validation. Poster Presentation at 2023 SCEC Annual Meeting.

Related Projects & Working Groups
Ground Motions