Working Group for Magnetotelluric Data Handling and Software

Current Members

Preamble to Working Group Charge

Under its new award, IRIS will establish a pool of community magnetotelluric (MT) systems at the PASSCAL Instrument Center (PIC). The PIC will comprehensively support modern MT instrumentation, provide expertise to reduce the knowledge and technical barriers for new principal investigators, and encourage more joint seismic-magnetotelluric studies. This effort will establish a user-friendly “dirt-to-desktop” workflow with software tools and data formats that aid the scientific throughput of MT data for non-experts.

Charge to Instrumentation Working Group

The working group will bring together stakeholders from the MT community and IRIS, including data specialists, software developers, and IRIS governance/facility staff. It will furnish input to guide IRIS in developing MT data handling practices through the following charges:

• Draft requests for feedback from magnetotelluric and IRIS user bases.
• Define the scope of programmatic needs for handling raw timeseries and metadata from “dirt to desktop”.
• Review existing data and metadata workflows for data processing, archiving, and creation of data products, including EarthScope MT-TA workflows, MTpy, and any relevant other community or commercial products.
• Assess the current formats for archived timeseries (miniSEED, PH5) and transfer functions (EDI, XML), including interfaces with other internationally used and recognized formats and the potential need for additional information in headers (e.g. auto and cross-powers).
• Consider need and utility for tracking users/downloads for quality assurance purposes.
• Explore potential for developing a community MT inversion software and turnkey or automated transfer function process.
• Assist in drafting functional or technical specifications for software development or RFQ.
• Beta test and provide feedback on products developed to support new MT dataflow.

This is an ad-hoc working group within the IRIS governance structure to be initially comprised of members from the IRIS Electromagnetic Advisory Committee (EMAC), MT science community, and IRIS facility. Observers from award institutions may be recused from certain discussions. Membership may evolve with the priorities of the working group. This group will report to the EMAC, which in turn reports to the PASSCAL Standing Committee. This working group’s tasks will be considered complete when a successful MT data processing and analysis workflow has been established, targeted by the end of the Federal fiscal year 21 (September 30, 2021).