Generic Mapping

Tools (GMT)
The Basics plus Plotting in X-Y Space

Goal
make scientific
illustrations

Generic is generic to the earth sciences

community

Maps
Color/bw/shaded topography and
bathymetry, point data (earthquakes,
seismic or gps stations, etc.), line data
(faults, eq rupture zones, roads), vector
fields w/ error ellipses, focal
mechanisms

3D surface
Cross sections

What is GMT
GMT is an open source collection of ~60 tools
for manipulating geographic and Cartesian data
sets (including filtering, trend fitting, gridding,
projecting, etc.)

What is GMT
Produces PostScript File (PS) illustrations ranging
from simple x-y plots via contour maps to
artificially illuminated surfaces and 3-D
perspective views

What is GMT
GMT supports ~30 map projections and
transformations and comes with support data
such as GSHHS coastlines, rivers, and political
boundaries

If it does not have a map projection you want: it

is open source and UNIX. (i.e. you can do it
yourself)

Design Philosophy
Follows the modular design philosophy of
UNIX:
The raw data processing final illustration ow
is broken down to a series of elementary steps

each step is accomplished by a separate GMT or

UNIX tool.

Design Philosophy
Benefits:
(1) only a few programs are needed
(2) each program is small and easy to update and
maintain
(3) each step is independent of the previous step and
the data type and can therefore be used in a
variety of applications
(4) the programs can be chained together in shell
scripts or with pipes, thereby creating a process
tailored to do a user-specific task

 Maintained by Paul Wessel and Walter Smith

(now at the University of Hawaii and NOAA
respectively)

The GMT homepage is: gmt.soest.hawaii.edu

GMT documentation
Tutorial
Technical Reference and Cookbook
(aka Manual)
both available on web (http://gmt.soest.hawaii.edu
/) as HTML on line, PDF, PostScript

GMT documentation
UNIX man pages available on web
and also as standard man pages on
local installation.

Entering GMT program/filter name all

by itself, or certain errors in command
specification (switches, not data)
dumps man page to standard error.

What does/can GMT do?

Filtering 1-D and 2-D data
simple processing
GMT is NOT a general Number
Cruncher

output is reprocessed data

What does/can GMT do?

Plotting 1-D and 2-D data
points, lines (symbols, fill, geologic
symbols on faults, etc.)

vector fields
2-D images grayscale and color,
illumination

3-D perspective of 2-D images

histograms, rose diagrams
text
focal mechanism beachballs

What does/can GMT do?

Data preparation
gridding, resampling, conversion
Contouring
data base: extraction, merge
cross sections
projection/map transformation (map sphere to plane)
output is reprocessed data

Bookkeeping and bunch of other

stuf

GMT Output
1-D ASCII Tables For example, a (x, y) series may be
filtered and the filtered values output. ASCII output is
written to the standard output stream.

2-D binary (netCDF or user-defined) grid files Programs that grid ASCII (x, y, z) data or operate on
existing grid files produce this type of output.

Reports Several GMT programs read input files and

report statistics and other information. Nearly all
programs have an optional verbose operation, which
reports on the progress of computation. Such text is
written to the standard error stream

GMT Output
PostScript The plotting programs all use the
PostScript page description language to define
plots. These commands are stored as ASCII
text.
If you are really ambitious, you can directly edit
this file using vimbut in general, dont.

Postscript is directly translated by line printers,

Adobe Illustrator/Photoshop, ghostscript,
ghostview.

I frequently use Illustrator to edit raw Postscript

prior to using figures in papers, presentations, or
posters

output is PostScript program generally ascii text, but

not too readable. (GMT files can get amazingly BIG)
%Mapboundaries
%
S1050105010500360arcS
S1050105010740360arcS
S24W
S10501050106213590arcS
S105010501062135180arcS
S1050105010624590arcS
S105010501062450arcS
S1050105010629090arcnS
S2W
S[]0B
%
%Endofbasemap
%
S[]0B
%%Trailer
%%BoundingBox:00647647
%Resettranslationsandscaleandcallshowpage
S295295T4.166674.16667scale0A
showpage

Installation/Maintenance
Done for us by Mitch THANKS.
Somewhat complicated, not for
average user but can be installed on
laptops
Setup basic setup done for us (dont
have to define GMTHOME, path, etc. if
use standard CERI .login and .cshrc files)

Installation/Maintenance
Some common data sets (GTOPO-30,
ETOPO-5, Predicted bathy, etc.) are
installed
.gmtdefaults (generic, is .gmtdefaults4 for version 4)
file in your home or working directory.

if youve copied something from the tutorial or gotten a script from

someone else and it comes out funny, the default settings may be
the culprit.

Easiest way to get started

Find system with GMT already set up
Get working program (shell script) from
someone else and modify (hack) it.
Lots examples in
Tutorial
available on www
available from your friends

Sources of operational
parameters/job control

command line options/switches or

program defaults

carried over from execution of

previous commands

from your .gmtdefaults file

(first in working directory if exists, if ~exist, then in your

home directory if exists, finally, system/program defaults)

Sources of operational
parameters/job control
Why a defaults file?
- too many parameters to require
setting all explicitly (powerful)
- customize can have diferent
defaults in diferent directories

Basic GMT use

Most GMT programs read input from
terminal (stdin) or files, and write
output to terminal (stdout) (a few write
to files).

To write output to files one can use

UNIX redirection:
GMTprogram switches >! outputfile
GMTprogram input-file switches >! outputfile

Basic GMT use

Some GMT programs will accept
input-file names, pipes and input
redirection in lieu of stdin

GMTprogram switches < input-file >> outputfile

Someprogram | GMTprogram1 | GMTprogram2 >> outputfile

Basic GMT use

Some GMT programs will accept inline input reads whatever follows -up to character string XXX -- as input.

GMTprogram switches << END >> output-file

.1 .1
.2 .2
END

Basic GMT use

Can also do with command
substitution:
GMTprogram switches << FIN >> output-file
`someprogram swithches < input-file`
FIN

Some GMT programs require input-file

names (usually if need more than one
input file)

GMT and scripts

GMT commands, once installed, act much like
regular Unix commands.

Generally, the commands are enacted within a

shell script so that they may be combined with
other unix commands such as awk.

Bash and csh are the most commonly

encountered in academia and passing down
GMT scripts is how much seismology gets
illustrated

Use Comments!
Comments are very popular to ignore but if you
dont comment your script, 2 years later you
may not remember what you were doing.

The spaces and blank lines make your script

readable. While it may take more paper if you
print it, it only takes two bytes to make new line
or a space.

Example 1:
PLOTTING in X-Y Space
psbasemap: Create a basemap frame
psxy: Plot symbols, polygons, and lines in 2-D
sample1d: Resampling of 1-D table data sets

1) We start by making the basemap frame for a linear x-y

plot that should be 5 by 3 inches in size. The J option
selects the type of projection (there are 25 potential
projections). X is linear projection.
psbasemap JX5i/3i

2) We want it to go from 0 to 100 in x and from 0 to 10 in

y. Specified by the REGION (-R) option, which (in the usual
form) is
psbasemap -R0/100/0/10 JX5i/3i

3) The plot should annotated every 20 in x and every 2 in

y with annotation on the lower and right axes only. This is
specified by the B option (Border).
psbasemap -R0/100/0/10 JX5i/3i \
-Ba20g10/a2f1g2WSne
a is for annotation spacing, 20 for x and 2 for y
g is for grid spacing, 10 for x and 2 for y
f is for frame, controlling
the minor tick spacing in
y only

4) The plot should be on portrait oriented paper (default

is landscape)
psbasemap -R0/100/0/10 JX5i/3i -B10/2nSeW P
5) Since we will be adding more GMT script, we need to
indicate this using the K switch
psbasemap -R0/100/0/10 JX5i/3i -B10/2nSeW K P
6) We can also specify exactly where on the page to place
the plot
psbasemap -R0/100/0/10 JX5i/3i -B10/2nSeW \
X2 Y14 K P >! plot.ps

7) Create a dataset of numbers from 0 to 100, every 1

point, and use awk to calculate the square root of each
point
sample1d -I1 << END |\
nawk '{print $1, sqrt($1)}' > input.dat
0
100
END

8a) Read in the new dataset and plot a line. Use the O
ag to specify that this will be overlain within the
boundaries of the previous gmt command
psxy input.dat R JX -K O >> plot.ps

8b) Use the W ag to specify the line

psxy input.dat R JX -W5t15_15 -K O >> plot.ps
The W command can be quite complicated. In this
example, the first 5 represents line width, the t signifies a
dashed line, the 15_15 specifies the dash and space
width
More simply, -W1/0 is more common. This is a 1 pt solid
line width in black. Or use W5/255/0/0 which is a solid
line, width of 5, color red.

9a) Overlay red triangles with green outlines on every 10

data points. -S ag specifies using symbols with the t
representing a triangle. When the S ag is used, -W
becomes the line around the symbol. -G controls the
color of the symbol.
sample1d input.dat -I10 |\
psxy -R JX -St0.2 -G255/0/0 -W5/0/255/0 -O >>
plot.ps

9b) Where is the K???

Because this is the last line of our script, the K ag is left
of.
sample1d input.dat -I10 |\
psxy -R JX -St0.2 -G255/0/0 -W5/0/255/0 -O >>
plot.ps

Several common gotchas

no showpage (can see on screen, but does not
print actually prints a blank page) (have a K
in last GMT call)
showpage in middle of file (forgot the K
somewhere) only get part of file on screen or
in final print or get ghostscript error message.
Have header in middle of file (forgot O
somewhere), get ghostscript error message.

There are two other non-map-projected

forms
1) Logarithmic - add l (lower case letter L)
after scale of axis you want logarithmic
-JX4l/2

2) Power/exponential add p and

exponent after scale of axis you want
exponential (can scale axes individually)
-JX4p0.5/2

GMT Colors
Color is specified using Red/Green/Blue (RGB),
HSV or Grayscale color
Grayscale:
WHITE=255
LTGRAY=192
VLTGRAY=225
EXTGRAY=250
GRAY=128
BLACK=0
RGB:
RED=250/0/0
DKRED=196/50/50
BLUE=0/0/255