A Portable toolbox for the visualization and processing of multimodal geophysical measurements

Abstract

The optimal design of field-scale, multi-modal geophysical surveys is currently limited by the lack of software tools that can be used to simulate, visualize and process large data sets. Geophysica is among the few software tools that provides a comprehensive suite of calculation methods for small data sets. Geophysica, while useful, is limited in its portability because each computer using it must possess an expensive MATLAB license. The objective of this study is to develop a portable software toolbox for the visualization and processing of large-scale multimodal near-surface geophysical measurements. We present a Microsoft Visual C++-based tool GeoPhysical Calculation Plus Plus (GPCPP) capable of the same numerical analyses as Geophysica but with significant improvements in simulation and processing capabilities. We developed GPCPP by using the OpenGL-based GUI builder glui, the open-source visualization toolkit Gnuplot and by implementing an n-length discrete Fourier transform method. This report provides a description of GPCPP's capabilities and discusses how these capabilities may be further expanded. The resulting toolbox is quite portable and can easily accommodate the large data sets typical of field-scale near surface geophysical surveys.