Final Project GEOS694

This project presents a workflow for querying aircraft crossings near seismic stations, downloading waveform data, generating spectrograms, and creating flight-path PDF reports for seismic and aircraft-analysis applications. It was developed as the final project for GEOS 694: Introduction to Computational Geosciences (Bryant Chow).

Version: 1.0.0

What

This project provides a structured workflow for identifying aircraft crossings near seismic stations and analyzing the associated data products. The repository includes tools for:

• reading and filtering aircraft crossing information
• downloading waveform windows from IRIS around crossing times
• generating spectrogram figures from downloaded MiniSEED files
• creating PDF reports that summarize flight geometry and station-crossing information

The repository also includes a Station_map/ folder with a separate station-mapping exercise using PyGMT.

How

The workflow is split into modular scripts:

• fetch_data.py downloads waveform data from IRIS
• spectrogram.py builds spectrogram products from downloaded MiniSEED files
• flight_query.py provides an interactive query and PDF-generation tool
• example/example_script.py gives a compact one-flight example that downloads waveform data, generates a spectrogram, and creates a flight-path PDF

The code uses reusable functions and a central FlightVizPDF class to organize data access, querying, plotting, and PDF export.

Why

The goal is to make the workflow easier to test, document, maintain, and expand for future aircraft-seismology analysis. Rather than writing one long script for a single figure, this project provides a reusable framework that other students can install, understand, and run.

---

Selected project tasks

Project Task 1

I selected the following items from Task 1:

• Classes
  The FlightVizPDF class serves as the main structural component of the flight-query and PDF-generation workflow. It bundles related data and methods for station metadata, crossing metadata, plotting, querying, and report generation.

• Parallel / Concurrency
  fetch_data.py uses ThreadPoolExecutor to download waveform windows for multiple rows more efficiently.

Project Task 2

I selected the following items from Task 2:

• Parameter Input System
  The project includes user input through the interactive menu in flight_query.py, where users can choose query types, dates, flight numbers, search radii, and output directories.

• Tests / Checks
  The scripts use checks such as file-existence tests, empty-data checks, value filtering, and try/except blocks to ensure the workflow fails gracefully when data are missing or inputs are invalid.

• State Saving
  The workflow saves intermediate and final products so they do not need to be recomputed each time:

  • downloaded waveforms are saved as MiniSEED files
  • spectrograms are saved as PNG files
  • flight-path reports are saved as PDF files

---

Clone this repository

git clone <github_link_to_repo>
cd Final_project_geos694

Installation

This project is intended to run in a Conda environment.

Create environment

conda env create -f environment.yaml
conda activate aircraftseismo

For class reviewers

The primary Python file for class review is example/example_script.py. The other main workflow files are fetch_data.py, spectrogram.py and Station_map/byoc_station_map.py, though I leave that to your preference.

Fetch waveform data from IRIS

python fetch_data.py

For fetch_data.py, you do not need to wait for full completion, since it may take time to download a large amount of data. Running it for 1 to 2 minutes is enough for review. You may then stop it with Ctrl + Z. At that point, an output/miniSEED/ folder should be created, containing waveform files organized by seismic station.

Generate spectrograms

python spectrogram.py

You may then run spectrogram.py. Again, you do not need to wait for full completion. Running it for 1 to 2 minutes is sufficient, and you may stop it with Ctrl + Z. After that, the output/spectrogram/ folder should contain waveform and spectrogram PNG files organized by station.

Please feel free to explore the repository further as needed.

Note: flight_query.py may also be useful to review, although some of its flight-path functionality depends on flightradar24 data stored on the LUNGS scratch system, so not all parts may be directly runnable in this repository.

Acknowledgments

Parts of this workflow were developed with guidance from and inspiration from existing code by Bella Seppi. Some ideas and code structure were adapted from the following repository: - uafgeotools/parkshwynodal(https://github.com/uafgeotools/parkshwynodal)

Thank you to Bella Seppi for making related workflow components and research code available.