Students in seismology often complain that they spend too much course time on the mathematics and little time looking at seismograms. The laboratory for this course was designed in response to that criticism. However, the benefits of the lab do not apply only to students of seismology. We will use research-quality observations to make “classic” seismological measurements such as travel times, magnitudes, dispersion measurements, etc. The benefit to non-seismologists includes experience working with uncensored data - the good and the bad. The analysis generally includes simple least-squares fitting, data weighting (throwing away the obviously bad stuff), and estimating uncertainties. These are valuable, transferable skills for any scientific discipline.

1. Logging onto the UNIX system (starting MATLAB)
2. Reading and plotting seismograms from UNIX
3. Picking body-wave travel times
4. Estimating teleseismic body-wave magnitude
5. Estimating teleseismic surface-wave magnitude
6. Explosions and earthquakes - a magnitude-based discriminant
7. First-motion faulting mechanisms - P-waves
8. First-motion faulting mechanisms - P & SH waves
9. Earthquake depth estimation using teleseismic body waveforms
10. Surface-wave dispersion and gross crustal structure
11. Receiver function analysis and crust structure
12. Shear-wave splitting and anisotropy
13. Strong-motion attenuation relations