The new SCEC Community Velocity Model Explorer

Scott T. Marshall, Mei-Hui Su, Philip J. Maechling, & Patricia Persaud

Submitted September 7, 2025, SCEC Contribution #14730, 2025 SCEC Annual Meeting Poster #TBD

Seismic velocity models provide critical data for seismic hazard assessments and ground motion predictions, as well as a range of other earthquake science research frontiers. A significant barrier to users is that velocity models are not standardized, and many do not provide a query interface or come in a widely-used data format. This forces users to invest significant research time just to visualize a given model and determine if it is appropriate for their needs. To lower the bar of entry and expand access to these rich data sets we have developed a web-based visualization and query tool, the CVM Explorer, utilizing a mix of existing and new cyberinfrastructure with a visual style similar to the other, existing, SCEC Community Earth Model Explorers. To facilitate rapid development, we utilized the latest SCEC Unified Community Velocity Model (UCVM) software framework as the backend software for querying, interpolating, and extracting CVM data. We then created a series of computationally-efficient scripts that allow the user to easily visualize 2D horizontal slices, 2D cross-sections, 1D vertical profiles, and single 0D point queries. The CVM Explorer interface is intuitive and allows users to select from 24 individual models and six combined (tiled) models. Because CVMs come in a wide range of resolutions and due to computational limitations, the CVM Explorer is designed to interpolate the source CVM models and return approximately 10,000 points no matter what size region is selected. This is sufficient to produce high-quality visualizations. Once extracted, users can download the interpolated data in .csv format and/or make publication quality visualizations using the integrated plotting interface. The plotting interface provides options for three different colormaps, interpolation (smoothing), labeling of faults and selected cities, and adjusting the plot ranges. Users can force the color ranges, which is useful when comparing two different models that may have different data ranges. We believe that the CVM Explorer will facilitate wide use of seismic velocity models by providing simple, fast, visual access to a large collection of California models, their coverage regions, and their properties.

Key Words
seismic velocity, community model, seismology, community earth model

Citation
Marshall, S. T., Su, M., Maechling, P. J., & Persaud, P. (2025, 09). The new SCEC Community Velocity Model Explorer. Poster Presentation at 2025 SCEC Annual Meeting.

Related Projects & Working Groups
Community Earth Models (CEM)