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Electronic Seismologist

Geopsy: A User-Friendly Open-


Source Tool Set for Ambient
Vibration Processing
Marc Wathelet*1, Jean-Luc Chatelain1, Cécile Cornou1, Giuseppe Di Giulio2,
Bertrand Guillier1, Matthias Ohrnberger3, and Alexandros Savvaidis4

Abstract
Ambient vibrations are nowadays considerably used worldwide for numerous types of
engineering applications and scientific research. Geopsy and its companion tools are
part of that landscape. Since the first release of the program package in 2005, as out-
come of the European Union project Site Effects aSsessment from AMbient noisE,
Geopsy has become a mature multiplatform open-source package (released under
GNU Public License version 3) that has already been recognized as a reference tool
for analyzing ambient vibration data in the context of site characterization studies.
The community of users has grown from a core group of researchers up to thousands
of seismologists and engineers on every career level and on all continents. The versa-
tility of geopsy allows for the processing of all kinds of data needed in site characteri-
zation studies, that is, from single station single trace to three-component array
recordings. In all of the aforementioned cases, the steps from field acquisition to
the production of publication-ready figures are covered and supported by user-friendly Cite this article as Wathelet, M., J.-
L. Chatelain, C. Cornou, G. D. Giulio,
graphical user interfaces or corresponding command-line tools for the automation of B. Guillier, M. Ohrnberger, and A. Savvaidis
the complete processing chain. To avoid black-box usage, a number of lower-level tools (2020). Geopsy: A User-Friendly Open-
Source Tool Set for Ambient Vibration
guarantee maximum flexibility in accessing and controlling processing results at any Processing, Seismol. Res. Lett. XX, 1–12,
stage of the analysis. doi: 10.1785/0220190360.

Introduction unknown properties and locations may be active at the same


Site characterization based on ambient vibration properties has time. Hence, unsupervised processing is certainly not the most
become increasingly popular during the past two decades, reliable way for extracting robust information. During the past
mostly because it is a reliable low-cost alternative for obtaining 20 yr, several European Union projects focused on developing
resonance frequencies for soils or buildings and V S profiles new processing tools and on evaluating the limitations of ambi-
compared with downhole or crosshole techniques (Garofalo, ent vibration methods: Site Effects aSsessment from AMbient
Foti, Hollender, Bard, Cornou, Cox, Dechamp, et al., 2016). noisE (SESAME, an FP5 project number EVG1-CT2000-
Applications extend over a wide range: seismic bedrock depth 00026, 2001–2004) and NEtwork of Research Infrastructures
imaging (e.g., Ibs-von Seht and Wohlenberg, 1999; Parolai et al., for European Seismology, Joint Research Activity number 4
2002; Özalaybey et al., 2011; Hellel et al., 2012), site effect assess- (an FP6 I3 project number RII3-CT-2006-026130, 2006–2010).
ments (e.g., Lermo and Chávez-García, 1994; Guéguen et al., Bard et al. (2010) provide a detailed review of the amount of
1998; Picozzi et al., 2009; Teague et al., 2018), buildings and work achieved during these projects. International blind tests
bridges (e.g., Crawford and Ward, 1964; Michel et al., 2010; (Cornou et al., 2007; Boore and Asten, 2008; Cox et al., 2014;
Guillier et al., 2014; Bindi et al., 2015), landslides (e.g., Garofalo, Foti, Hollender, Bard, Cornou, Cox, Ohrnberger, et al.,
Meric et al., 2005; Burjánek et al., 2012; Zare et al., 2017), vol- 2016) showed that the estimation of surface-wave dispersion
canoes (e.g., Sens-Schönfelder and Wegler, 2006; Perrier et al., curves is generally good. However, retrieving V S profiles from
2012; Bennington et al., 2015), and even Mars exploration
(Knapmeyer-Endrun et al., 2017). Similar to active source multi- 1. Université Grenoble Alpes, Université Savoie Mont Blanc, CNRS, IRD, IFSTTAR,
channel analysis of surface waves (Park et al., 1999), ambient ISTerre, Grenoble, France; 2. Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia, L’Aquila,
Italy; 3. University of Potsdam, Institute of Geoscience, Potsdam, Germany; 4. Bureau
vibration processing relies mostly on the dispersive properties of Economic Geology, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas, U.S.A.
of surface waves (Rayleigh and/or Love; Bonnefoy-Claudet et al., *Corresponding author: marc.wathelet@univ-grenoble-alpes.fr
2006), but it carries additional complexities: several sources with © Seismological Society of America

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dispersion curve inversion, usually of the Rayleigh-wave funda-
TABLE 1
mental mode only, remains a difficult problem with no unique
Available Methods to Import Seismic Signals inside
solution. A large part of the teams involved in these tests are Geopsy
using the open-source software Geopsy, born in 2002 within
the SESAME project and primarily released in 2005. In Method Short Description
15 yr, it has become a reference tool worldwide for ambient Application Wildcards are accepted (e.g., geopsy WAU??/
vibration processing. A Google Scholar search for “geopsy.org” arguments WA.WAU*HH*)
currently returns 742 entries (November 2019). A quick survey Manual The classical dialog box for selecting files in a single
made in September 2017 returned 491 entries, among which 203 selection directory
were journal peer-reviewed papers using Geopsy.
File pattern Inside the graphical interface, files matching a pattern
Geopsy is a graphical desktop application dedicated to even across several directories can be imported with a
seismic signal processing. geopsypack is the package used to dis- single action
tribute Geopsy and a number of companion tools (41 applica-
Storage media Direct read of proprietary storage media of some
tions, 14 plugin libraries, and 22 core libraries, see Data and acquisition devices (Cityshard cards and Campbell TOB3)
Resources). All items are designed with object-oriented pro-
Directory Automatically import any new file created in a
gramming, and the only language is C++. High-level graphical
monitoring directory. It can be coupled with an acquisition
interfaces are developed on top of Qt libraries (version 5.12, see application to process signals with Geopsy while being
Data and Resources), which makes the package available to the on the field (e.g., Seismodule Controller Software from
most common platforms: Linux, Microsoft Windows, and Mac geometrics)
OS. Apart from the graphical user interface (GUI), all tools can Seedlink Connect to a Seedlink server and continuously
be used directly via the command-line interface, allowing connection download available signals for the selected streams
powerful scripting and the implementation of automatic analy-
sis schemes to bulk data sets. The recent release of geopsypack
(version 3) emphasizes this orientation with new command-line trying to recognize a file format. Geopsy can be used to convert
tools implementing horizontal-to-vertical (H/V) spectral ratios seismic signals between different formats. For example,
(also commonly termed HVSR) and array processing that were,
to date, available only inside the Geopsy graphical interface. geopsy my.mseed -export my_0001.sac
After a presentation of the Geopsy graphical environment,
this article focuses on the two main plugin tools used for ambi- converts a single MiniSeed file into several SAC files (Goldstein
ent vibration processing: H/V and array tools. The correspond- et al., 2003).
ing command-line tools are also detailed at the end. Several ways are available to import signals (Table 1).
Importing signals is generally very fast because only the header
General Framework information is read and stored in the internal database. Data
In this section, we briefly present the main features of Geopsy vectors are read only when required (e.g., for plotting signals
GUI to work with ground-motion signals: import, associate, on the screen or for signal processing). The next section
view, and save. This section ends with a description of the spe- presents how to associate signals before processing.
cific plotting engine available with this package. More details
and tutorials can be found in the Geopsy on-line documenta- Associating and viewing signals
tion (Wathelet et al., 2010). A signal is a continuous record of a single component between
an absolute starting time and an absolute ending time, inter-
Importing signals nally represented by a single and continuous vector of values. If
Geopsy reads most standard formats commonly used for ambi- some recorded samples are not valid (e.g., digitizer errors or
ent vibration and active surface-wave imaging: CityShark2 and unplugged sensor), gaps can be added manually. A gap is
MiniShark*, GeoSIG, GSE2*, GuralpGcf, MATLAB MAT*, defined by a period of time during which no signal can be proc-
MiniSeed*, Passcal SegY, SAC*, SAF*, Seg2*, SegY*, SU*, essed. Signals to process may be distributed over several files or
WAV*, and column text files*. Formats marked with an aster- several data sources (e.g., recording device proprietary storage
isk can also be exported. All formats are automatically recog- or streaming). In addition, some files may contain signals to be
nized from their content, except SU and GuralpGCF, for which excluded from the process. Creating new files that contain only
the correct file suffix is mandatory. For text formats in which the desired signals usually implies a format conversion and a
amplitude values are stored in columns, a custom parser can be waste of disk space. Hence, the concept of file is not well suited.
built to extract useful information from the headers (e.g., sam- Instead, we consider signals as the basic element.
pling frequency, starting time, and position). Custom formats Signals to process can be associated in a temporary or per-
are considered in the same way as standard formats when manent way (group). Dragging signals from sources and

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(a)

(c) (e)

(b) (d) (f)

dropping them to one of the four destination viewers described Figure 1. Geopsy graphical interface showing (a) the list of
in the following (table, graphic, map, and chronogram; Fig. 1) imported files, (b) the list of groups and the four ways of viewing
creates a temporary association. Sources can be the list of signals: (c) table, (d) graphic, (e) map, and (f) chronogram. The
topmost menu bar provides access to all actions that can be
imported files, the list of permanent associations (groups), or performed on signals: input/output actions, editing signal
an existing viewer, which represents a temporary association properties, creating new viewers, waveform operations, and
of signals. At any time, it can be saved to become a permanent plugin tools. Just below, the icon tool bar contains a selection of
association (group). A group is defined by a name, a list of sig- the most important actions organized in three sections: input/
nals, and a parent group. Folders can be created to help organize output actions, creation of new viewers, and the list of plugin
tools. Data are taken from two ambient vibration arrays (circular
groups. For example, a group can keep together the signals from
arrays from 5 to 15 m and from 15 to 45 m) recorded in
a target site or signals with the same components. Associated Mirandola, Italy, during the InterPACIFIC project (Garofalo, Foti,
signals can be processed with any of the implemented basic sig- Hollender, Bard, Cornou, Cox, Ohrnberger, et al., 2016).
nal-processing tools, such as mean or trend removal, subtract,
multiply, filter, whiten, clip, phase shift, over-sample, decima-
tion, taper, cut, merge, three-component rotations, correlations, available and are implemented in separated plugins (see the
convolution, and instrumental response removal. All processes Plugin Tools section).
are logged as a sequence of JavaScript statements, which can be A table shows all properties of the signals with a tabular
executed on another signal association. For example, the follow- format, one row per signal and one column per property.
ing code cuts and exports 30 s windows starting at 2:30 a.m. on 1 The order and the list of the columns can be freely customized.
January 2000 from a list of three-component signals: The various ways of editing property values are described in
the next section. The rows of a table support complex selec-
n=signalCount(); tions with SHIFT and CTRL keys (Fig. 1b). Moreover, signals
for (i=0; i<n; i++) { can be sorted with multiple sort keys so as to ease the selection.
restoreStep (“original”); Once selected, signals can be dragged and dropped into a new
selectSignals (i, i); viewer or into an existing one.
cut (“[abs 20000101023000; delta 30s]”); A graphic displays signal data vectors with an absolute or rel-
name=header (0, “Name”); ative time axis. There is no limit to the number of signals to be
name+=“_”+header (0, “Component”); plotted. However, the length of a single signal cannot exceed the
exportFile (name+”.sac”); limit of the physical memory. If the size required by all signals is
} larger than a certain limit (by default, 80% of the physical
memory), the Geopsy internal swap mechanism prevents the
More examples and details can be found in Wathelet et al. use of the operating system swap. The latter often alters the
(2010). Other more sophisticated processing tools are also computer performances and challenges the user patience.

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Time picking, zooming, and display normalization adjustments path. A specific tool is available to modify receiver coordinates;
are available. If data vectors are not in memory, they are loaded it can read text formats in which coordinates are arranged in
from the original files, which may take some time during the columns. Transformation to UTM from WGS84 latitude and
first display. The performances of this signal viewer are com- longitude is also provided.
pared with other viewing solutions later in a dedicated section. Modifying property values is even better if it can be saved
Individual signals cannot be selected in a graphic; when dragging for some later usages. Details about signal property storage are
signals from a graphic, all signals are considered. given in the next sections.
A map is a 2D map of the sensor locations. Each signal is
located in space by its sensor coordinates. Geopsy supports Event table
only metric coordinates because it is designed for small-scale Event table stores a list of seismic events defined by their loca-
experiments (usually less than a few kilometer aperture), for tions and their absolute trigger times. It is built automatically
which earth curvature can be neglected. However, Universal when importing Seg2 files, which are supposed to store signals
Transverse Mercator (UTM) coordinates can be used to keep produced by an active source. It is generally triggered at the
track of the true geographical position. In this case, a UTM beginning of the signals eventually with a pretrigger delay.
zone is also assigned to each signal. In a map, signals can The table can be also edited or imported from a text file.
be selected in space by drawing a rectangle with the mouse. Events are not stored as a signal property because a source
Viewing a map is fast because data vectors are not accessed. may be recorded by several signals and a signal may record
A chronogram is a tool to check the availability of signals in several sources. Currently, dense arrays of sensors are gaining
time. Signals with the same name and the same receiver coordi- popularity even for near-surface imaging. They usually provide
nates are associated in a single entity. For each entity, green boxes continuous records instead of triggered records. The event
are displayed for the time ranges for which the signal is available. table is used to define time windows to process and the cor-
For the missing parts, red boxes are displayed. Blue boxes show responding source locations for active experiments.
available signals that overlap in time. Even for very long time
series (e.g., over months), viewing a chronogram is fast because Geopsy database
data vectors are not required. In a chronogram, signals can be A Geopsy database gathers the list of signal files, the list of
selected interactively by drawing rectangles with the mouse. groups, and the list of events. Each signal file contains a list
of signals with their properties but without data vectors. For
Signal properties each file, the absolute file path is saved to access to the data
The main signal properties are sampling frequency, absolute start- vectors. If paths are changed, missing files are detected and
ing time, sensor location, component, and name. The name is an the new paths are asked of the user. A dictionary linking
arbitrary string to identify a signal. For a three-component sensor, old and new paths is built for each session to avoid multiple
the three signals must share the same name, the same receiver requests. A database file has a compressed XML format and is
coordinates, and approximately the same time range (with at least named with a .gpy suffix. The XML content can be extracted
a 90% overlap). There are also other properties to store conver- with the tar utility. To save time when opening a database,
sion factors between counts, volts, and real units (m, m/s, or m/ original file headers are not read anymore.
s2). A complete property list is available in the Geopsy online
documentation (Wathelet et al., 2010). The property values are Versatile plots
read from the header of the original signals when they are avail- All plots produced by Geopsy and its companion applications
able. When file headers do not contain all of the necessary infor- have the same structure and are managed by SciFigs library
mation or contain wrong values, editing can be done directly in a (Wathelet et al., 2010). They are made of a stack of indepen-
table before processing data. They can also be exported in a text dent layers that can be easily manipulated (reorder, save, pre-
file, modified outside Geopsy, and reimported. An internal pend, append, copy, paste, change opacity, or hide). All
JavaScript-like scripting engine can also be used to modify signal painting operations are performed through parallel threads,
properties. In the following example, the station names are with three main advantages: (1) the application never freezes
extracted from the file names for all signals in the current viewer: during heavy painting operations, thus leaving the plain con-
trol to the user; (2) painting several plots at the same time uses
for (i=0; i<signals.length; i++) { the full power of modern multicore architectures; and (3) plot
signals [i].name=signals[i]. shortFileName. properties can be modified by the user with an instantaneous
substring (3,8) influence over the final result. Layers can be copied across
} applications from the Geopsy package, which greatly helps
when comparing results from various processes.
in which signals.length is the number of signals in the current Plot properties can be fully customized inside the applica-
viewer and shortFileName is the file name without its absolute tion producing the plot or saved for future use (a compressed

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XML format with .page suffix). Plots from various applica-
TABLE 2
tions can be merged inside a single sheet with the lightweight
Comparison of Signal-Plotting Applications
application figue. Compared with a direct export to an image
format such as PNG, JPEG, or SVG, all properties of a plot Software Version Interactive Paint Delay (s)
can still be fully modified at any time (e.g., after a paper
Geopsy 3.3.0 Smooth 1
review). The plot quality meets the standards required for
ObsPy 1.1.1 (python 3.7.3) Basic 1
publication.
PQLII 2010.246 beta Basic 3
A fast and parallel signal display MATLAB R2019a Very slow 13
Ambient vibration signals recorded with portable stations, par-
Approximate time needed to display 259 million of samples for some common
ticularly in urban environments, very often show a significant
packages. The refresh time is provided here excluding the time needed to read
deterioration in signal quality due to several reasons: bad cable data from files. For PQLII, the time reported here is the time required to magnify
connection to sensor, baseline instabilities, amplitude satura- the full range.
tion, wind effects, nearby sources, power failure, and other
interferences. Hence, ambient vibration time-series analysis
always requires human control through an efficient signal dis- Plugin Tools
play, for example, to reject transients before H/V processing Several modules have been developed to extend the function-
(SESAME, 2004). High-frequency sampling rate, large number alities of the framework described in the previous sections.
of stations, and long duration recordings lead to a high number They mostly propose sophisticated signal processing focused
of samples to handle. For example, a 1-day recording at 100 on one particular application. The two most popular modules
samples per second with 10 three-component sensors, that dedicated to ambient vibrations, that is, H/V and array
is, 259 million of samples, weighs 990 MB in Seismic processing, are presented later. Currently, 12 tools are avail-
Analysis Code (SAC) format (Goldstein et al., 2003) and about able; their complete descriptions can be found in Wathelet et al.
300 MB in miniSEED format. (2010).
To build signal plots, Geopsy is based on the layered plots Tools are always attached to a viewer, which represents an
described in the previous section. The layer in charge of paint- association of signals as discussed earlier. They provide a form
ing signals is designed for long time series. When the number to specify processing and output parameters. They produce
of samples is large, painting all high-frequency details of a sig- either plots inside the graphical interface or output files to
nal is not efficient. Instead, Geopsy computes the minimum be analyzed outside Geopsy.
and maximum values of the signal over the time range corre- Tools are compiled in separate dynamically loadable libra-
sponding to each pixel. A vertical bar is painted only between ries. New tools can be implemented in C++ by subclassing the
those two values, which produces the same result as a full class GeopsyGuiInterface. Only two functions must be reimple-
painting of all signal samples. The time spent for displaying mented: one for creating the action in the tool bar and another
signals is thus optimum. In addition, the size of the exported one to create the parameter widget. The available plugin libra-
vectorized images (SVG or PDF) is kept to reasonable values: ries can serve as a template collection to inspire new tools.
14 three-component stations during 6 hr at 100 samples per
second weigh only 366 KB in a PDF file. Other competing soft- Single station H/V
ware commonly used for signal control, such as MATLAB (see This is the very first Geopsy tool whose development started
Data and Resources) and PQLII (Mcnamara and Buland, during the SESAME project. The main purpose of this tool is to
2004), do not offer the responsiveness obtained with Geopsy compute the classical H/V of three-component ambient vibra-
plots. tion recordings (Nakamura, 1989; Bonnefoy-Claudet et al.,
To quantify Geopsy efficiency, we composed a data set 2006). Its core structure was inspired by FORTRAN codes
from a synthetic 1-day array of 10 three-component stations developed by Bard (1999). This module does not provide
recording at 100 samples per second (259 million of sam- advanced ways of computing H/V, such as, for example,
ples), displayed with Geopsy, PQLII, ObsPy (Beyreuther et al., extracting Rayleigh ellipticity (Hobiger et al., 2009) or getting
2010), and MATLAB. The time required to plot the full data spectral ratios compatible with the diffuse wavefield
set (Table 2) was counted manually on the same machine assumption (Sánchez-Sesma et al., 2011; Tchawe et al., 2020).
(Intel Xeon CPU E5-2680 version 3 at 2.50 GHz). Geopsy Three-component signals are divided into time windows
and ObsPy achieve almost the same performances for loading over the entire record or over a selected portion of the record
and painting signals, but only Geopsy provides a smooth (Fig. 2a). Time window size, optional antitrigger (short-term
interactivity to inspect them. The two other codes are not average/long-term average), and various parameters (more
able to handle this amount of data with a reasonable information in Wathelet et al., 2010) are set up manually or
interactivity. loaded from a previous processing. Time windows can be

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(a) not always fit exactly with the peak of the average H/V curve.
The initial frequency range for searching peaks on the individ-
ual H/V curves can eventually be edited to fix misidentified
peaks or to evidence secondary peaks. Optionally, the H/V
curves for each time window can be shown with the same col-
ors as in the signal viewer of Figure 2a. This provides a quick
way to localize individual H/V curves on the time scale.
If the provided signals belong to more than one station (dis-
(b) (c) tinct names or coordinates), the aforementioned processing is
repeated for each station and a summary with at least two plots
is produced: the first one gathers all individual average H/V
curves (Fig. 3a), whereas the second shows the average curve
(and its standard deviation) of the H/V curves of the first plot
(Fig. 3b). The peak frequency average and its associated stan-
dard deviation are obtained by averaging peak frequencies of
all processed stations. If coordinates are assigned to the sta-
tions, a map is produced displaying H/V peak amplitudes
or peak frequencies at the location of each recording site
(Fig. 3c). Many options, detailed in Wathelet et al. (2010), exist
for customizing these maps.
Figure 2. (a) Selected time windows for signals recorded at two Several tools are also available to further analyze a classical
stations (CN01 and CN02). In this example, the antitrigger was H/V measurement. H/V rotate computes H/V in all directions
used. Horizontal-to-vertical (H/V) curves at stations (b) CN01 and
(c) CN02. H/V curve for each selected time window is shown with
of the horizontal plane (Fig. 4). A strong azimuthal variation
the same color as the corresponding time window in (a). The may be the first indication of a nonuniform source distribution
averaged H/V is shown with the black continuous line and the and/or the presence of ground heterogeneities. Spectrum and
standard deviation with the two dashed lines. The two gray areas spectrum rotate provide smoothed spectra of individual com-
represent the averaged peak frequency and its standard ponents with the same processing parameter as H/V. Damping
deviation. The peak frequency value is at the limit between the
may help identify peak frequencies produced by anthropogenic
dark and the light gray areas.
sources (Dunand et al., 2002). Other modules to extract
Rayleigh ellipticity (Hobiger et al., 2009) or H/V under the dif-
selected either manually or automatically, with or without fuse wavefield assumption (Tchawe et al., 2020) might be
overlap, keeping or rejecting part of the samples. Generated implemented in the future.
time windows may be removed manually, or the selection
may be inverted; they can also be loaded from a previous Array processing
processing. Once H/V curves are computed, time windows The array-processing module provides frequency–wavenum-
can also be eliminated from the final plots, either manually ber (FK) techniques (Capon, 1969; Poggi and Fäh, 2010;
or automatically, using an H/V amplitude threshold inside a Wathelet et al., 2018) and spatial autocorrelation (SPAC) tech-
given frequency range. niques (Aki, 1957; Bettig et al., 2001; Köhler et al., 2007) for
The horizontal spectrum is obtained using both horizontal vertical and three-component arrays. They are mostly dedi-
components, either with a squared average, the total power, or cated to ambient vibrations processing, but the FK techniques
the power along a given direction (Wathelet et al., 2010). The can also be used for active sources. Only FK for ambient vibra-
averaged H/V curve is obtained by averaging H/V curves com- tions is detailed in this short overview.
puted for each selected time window. The most common Inside Geopsy GUI, for a set of frequencies and for all sets of
smoothing method is Konno and Ohmachi (1998) with time windows (block averaging, Capon, 1969), peaks of FK
b-parameter value defined by the user, but other methods maps (FK power vs. kx and ky) are automatically searched
are also available (Wathelet et al., 2010). and refined. Various properties of the maxima are saved in
Individual H/V plots (Fig. 2b,c) display the average H/V a .max file: time, frequency, polarization, slowness, azimuth,
curve, its standard deviation, the peak frequency with the high- power, ellipticity, and noise. The last two are only available
est amplitude, and the corresponding standard deviation. The for the Rayleigh three-component beamforming (RTBF) tech-
peak frequency and its associated standard deviation are nique (Wathelet et al., 2018). Polarization can be either vertical
obtained by averaging the frequency of the maximum found (single-component processing), Rayleigh, or Love (three-com-
on the H/V curve of each time window in a 10% interval ponent processing). Figure 5 shows how parameters can be
around the peak of the average H/V curve. Hence, it may adjusted inside the graphical interface. A tool is also provided

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(a) (b) in a .max file versus frequency.
10 10 The former offers more pos-
sibilities to dissect the results:
8 8 filtering outliers, separating
modes, and extracting statis-
tics. The last one is more static,
6 6
but it displays in a convenient
H/V

H/V
way all properties contained in
4 4 a .max file: dispersion, elliptic-
ity, noise, azimuth, and power
2 2 curves. An example is shown in
Figure 6 for a three-component
0 0 FK analysis. Once dispersion
0.5 1 5 10 0.5 1 5 10 curves and eventually elliptic-
Frequency (Hz) Frequency (Hz) ity curves are isolated for all
available modes, average
(c) curves with their standard
20 deviation can be computed by
gphistogram. They can be pro-
vided as targets to dinver, an
application implementing a
0.84
neighborhood algorithm

H/V peak frequency (Hz)


10
(Wathelet, 2008) for the inver-
sion of dispersion curves to
0.80 retrieve V S and V P profiles.
Rayleigh and/or Love, funda-
Y (m )

0 mental and/or higher modes,


0.76 phase and/or group velocity,
and ellipticity curves can be
inverted together.

–10 0.72 Core Tools


For heavy data sets or repeti-
tive tasks, the tools inside the
graphical interface might not
–20 be suitable. Therefore, the
aforementioned tools have
–20 –10 0 10 their corresponding core appli-
X (m ) cations that can be run in a
high-performance computing
Figure 3. H/V graphics summary obtained when at least two H/V curves are computed. (a) H/V curves (HPC) facility or on a server
of all stations gathered on the same plot. (b) Averaged H/V curve of all individual curves of (a) and its with no graphical service. The
standard deviation. Legend as in Figure 2. (c) Map of H/V peak frequencies with the labels showing core libraries used by these
the station names. Labels can also display the peak frequencies or the peak amplitudes. tools and their graphical coun-
terparts produce exactly the
same results. However, some
to manually inspect sets of time blocks at any frequency. An FK low-level parameters are not accessible inside the graphical
map is displayed with several options and a high-resolution interface.
zoom, which dynamically samples the FK power function The signals to be processed are specified by passing a
(Fig. 5b). Geopsy database file path and a list of groups as in the follow-
Following the usage of Geopsy, two applications are pro- ing example:
vided to analyze the .max file: gphistogram and gpviewmax.
They both construct histograms of various data contained geopsy-fk -db my.gpy -group-path mygroup

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by Univ of Newcastle user
180
TABLE 3
Available Core Tools
150
Tool Name Short Description

geopsy-hv H/V spectra


120
geopsy-fk Conventional, high-resolution, vertical,
Azimuth (degrees)

and three-component FK methods

90 geopsy-spac Vertical and three-component SPAC methods

FK, frequency–wavenumber; H/V, horizontal-to-vertical; SPAC, spatial


autocorrelation.
60

30 processing. Since then, it underwent huge and crucial transfor-


mations that made it a reference tool for all types of ambient
vibration processing, used worldwide in the engineering and
0 scientific communities.
0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 2 4 6 8 10 20
Frequency (Hz) Geopsy is a free software released under GNU Public
License version 3, and it can be installed on virtually all ver-
sions of Linux, Microsoft Windows, and Mac OS. The Geopsy
0 2 4 6 8 10
H/V amplitude
package and its documentation are available online (see Data
and Resources). Since 2005, 12 workshops have been organized
around the world to teach ambient vibration techniques and
Figure 4. H/V amplitude distribution in the horizontal plane as a
function of the azimuth at station CN01 of Figure 2, calculated Geopsy usage that include 20–30 participants (students, engi-
from 0° to 180° every 10°, presented in a frequency–azimuth neers, and researchers) and last from 6 to 7 days. The next
graphic. sessions will be announced at Geopsy website (see Data and
Resources).
To date, the design, the implementation, and the mainte-
nance have been achieved by a very small group of enthusiastic
It starts FK processing with the default parameters on group individuals. Operating systems, user needs, geophysical meth-
mygroup found in database file my.gpy. Parameters can be ods, and scripting languages in vogue (e.g., Python) are con-
adjusted directly in the command line or by providing a text stantly evolving. For a sustainable future for this project, a
file with a list of keywords and their values. A template param- continuous development effort should be made and better
eter file can be obtained by running shared among the community. Hence, readers and users are
kindly invited to participate.
geopsy-fk -db my.gpy -param-example > my.param

Data and Resources


A description of all available options for each application is
All data used in this article came from published sources
provided when “-h” is used as an argument.
listed in the references. All figures were produced and all codes
All tools work with parallel threads whose number is set to snippets were tested with geopsypack version 3.3.0 available
the number of available cores using processor affinity. For at http://www.geopsy.org under GNU Public License (GPL)
example, on an HPC cluster managed by a task manager such version 3. Information about Qt libraries is available at https://
as OAR (Capit et al., 2005), the number of threads matches www.qt.io. MATLAB is available at https://www.mathworks.com/
exactly the number of reserved cores and each thread remains products/matlab.html. All websites were last accessed in
always on the same core during the whole process so as to February 2020.
deliver the best performances.
Table 3 provides the list of the currently available
Acknowledgments
core tools and a short description of the implemented The authors are grateful to Pierre-Yves Bard who led a number of
methods. projects supporting site characterization with ambient vibrations in
the years 2000 that were particularly helpful during the startup of
Conclusion Geopsy. The authors thank the numerous users who helped with
During the SESAME project (2001–2004), Geopsy was bug hunting and/or submitted their needs and suggestions. Geopsy
meant and designed specifically for ambient vibration array has been funded by Site Effects aSsessment from AMbient noisE

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by Univ of Newcastle user
(a)

(b) (c)

1×10–5 1×10–4 1×10–3 1×10–2


FK power

Figure 5. Three-component frequency–wavenumber (FK) by a black circle; its velocity value can be changed in the
processing example for an array of 15 three-component stations. underneath controls (251 m/s in this example). The gray dots are
(a) Waveforms for the first five stations. The green rectangles located at the nodes of the starting grid used for searching
delineate the time blocks calculated for a frequency of 4.09 Hz automatically the FK maxima. (c) Processing parameters form
that can be adjusted in the parameter toolbox shown in (c). The divided into four tabs. Only the content of Processing tab is
red rectangles are the 60 blocks (block averaging count factor in shown. Time tab describes how time blocks are defined: starting
(c) times 15 stations) used for computing the FK map shown in and ending time to process, length of blocks, and so on.
(b). (b) Rayleigh three-component beamforming (RTBF) FK map Processing tab specifies the frequency range of interest and how
of the highlighted red blocks in (a). The colors represent the the cross-spectrum matrix is computed. Grid search tab provides
maximum RTBF power obtained after varying the ellipticity for ways to control the grid search of FK maxima. Status tab shows
each wavenumber point. Maxima are distributed over two circles, the processing progress over all parallel threads after pressing the
corresponding to two propagation modes. The slowest is marked Start button.

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by Univ of Newcastle user
(a) (b)

40

100 0
Velocity (m/s)

Ellipticity
0
500

–40

5 10 5 10
Frequency (Hz) Frequency (Hz)

(c) (d)
1 × 10–1
300
5 × 10–2
Azimuth (degrees)

200
Power 1 × 10–2
5 × 10–3

100
1 × 10–3
5 × 10–4
0
5 10 5 10
(e) Frequency (Hz) Frequency (Hz)
5 × 101
Incoherent noise

0 1 10 100 1000
1 × 101 Normalized probability density

5 10
Frequency (Hz)

(SESAME, an FP5 Project Number EVG1-CT-2000-00026, 2001– Figure 6. Example of results obtained with gpviewmax for a three-
2004), Sismovalp Intereg 3B project (2005), by the participants component FK processing. All plots show the probability density of
to the first site characterization workshops in Grenoble (2005) property values measured at the peaks of the FK maps. (a) Dispersion
and Berlin (2006), by NEtwork of Research Infrastructures for curve. Two modes are visible in this case. The black lines are located
European Seismology project (NERIES-JRA4, an FP6 I3 Project at the resolution limits kmin/2 and kmin (Wathelet et al., 2008).
(b) Ellipticity curves corresponding to the two modes visible in (a).
Number RII3-CT-2006-026130, 2006–2010), by Institut de Recherche
(c) Propagation azimuth distribution. (d) FK power. (e) Incoherent
pour le Développement (IRD) since 2008, and by European Plate
noise estimations as defined by Wathelet et al. (2018).
Observing System-Implementation phase (EPOS-IP). The authors
also thank all institutions that hosted the site characterization work-
shops; a list is available at http://www.geopsy.org. Geopsy website is
hosted at Observatoire des Sciences de l'Univers de Grenoble (OSUG), References
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