Own and used geophysical software

The Department of Geophysics offers various software packages for employees and students. External users can also benefit from the following open source projects.

Own geophysical software

CRTomo

CRTomo is an inversion code for complex resistance tomography and was originally developed by Prof A. Kemna. Further information can be found on the homepage or in the publication below:

Kemna, A. (2000). Tomographic inversion of complex resistivity. Ruhr-Universität Bochum, 169.

CRTomo GitHub

Kemna, A. (2000) (PDF)

Kemna 2000 PhD thesis.pdf

CRTomo-Tools

The Department of Geophysics is actively developing a Python environment for working with electrical impedance data. At the heart of crtomo-tools is a Python interface for the CRTomo modelling and inversion code.

CRTomo-Tools

Documentation

REDA - Reproducible Electrical Data Analysis

REDA is a scientific Python library for reproducible geoelectrical data analysis. It aims to provide a unified interface for common and advanced data processing steps while bridging the gap between a multitude of geoelectrical measurement devices and inversion codes used across the geophysical community. It offers functionality to import, analyze, process, visualize, and export geoelectrical data with particular emphasis on time-lapse functionality and reproducibility. The latter is realized in the form of a logging system, which keeps track of each individual processing step applied to particular data set in a human-readable journal. There is also limited functionality to create measurements configurations, and export those files to various system specific file formats.
REDA is platform compatible, tested and open-source under the permissive MIT license.

REDA GitHub

Documentation

CCD-Tools

This package contains an implementation of the Cole-Cole decomposition scheme (CCD), which is used in near-surface geophysical applications to describe electric polarisation signatures measured for frequencies in the mHz range up to several kHz.

In the CCD, spectrally induced polarisation signatures (SIP) are described by a superposition of elementary polarisation terms that are distributed in such a way that they cover at least the frequency range of the measurement data.

Further information can be found on the project homepage: https://m-weigand.github.io/ccd_tools

Parts of this code have been described in two open access publications:

1. Weigand und Kemna, 2016, Computer und Geowissenschaften
2. Weigand und Kemna, 2016, Geophysical Journal International

Complex valued probabilistic inversion

This package provides an implementation of a framework for the solution of non-linear inverse problems in complex variables ( introduced by Hase et al. 2024). While solving the inverse problem by Gauss-Newton optimization, the framework uses a probabilistic formulation of the inverse problem that accounts accurately for complex data errors, cross-sensitivities and provides the capability to apply independent regularization on the real and imaginary part of the complex model.

The corresponding download and further information on installation and use can be found here.

Optimized measurement scheme design for ERT surveys

This code supplies a framework for the computation of optimized measurement schemes. The implemented algorithm is based on the "Compare-R"-method (e.g., Wilkinson et al. 2012), which creates an optimized measurement scheme using iterative, efficient updates of the model resolution matrix. The code, examples for the optimization of single- and multichannel surveys, as well as an example for the optimization of configurations for a closed rhizotron geometry can be found in the Github.

GitHub Repository

External software

The following is a selection of externally developed open source software that is actively used in teaching and research in the Department of Geophysics.

pyGIMLi

pyGIMLi is an open-source library for modelling and inversion and in geophysics. The object-oriented library provides management for structured and unstructured meshes in 2D and 3D, finite-element and finite-volume solvers, various geophysical forward operators, as well as Gauss-Newton based frameworks for constrained, joint and fully-coupled inversions with flexible regularization.

What is pyGIMLi suited for?

analyze, visualize and invert geophysical data in a reproducible manner
forward modelling of (geo)physical problems on complex 2D and 3D geometries
inversion with flexible controls on a-priori information and regularization
combination of different methods in constrained, joint and fully-coupled inversions
teaching applied geophysics (e.g. in combination with Jupyter notebooks)

Click here for the pyGIMLi documentation.

pyGIMLI GitHub

Questions and Answers

What other services does the Geophysics Section offer?

In addition to a range of internal services, the Geophysics department offers the software listed above. These software packages are developed in co-operation with or within the Geophysics department. Further services are listed on the Services page. Technical tools and workflows used in the Geophysics department are listed on another page.