The International Seismological Centre (ISC) Earthquake Toolbox for MATLAB: Interactive Access to Earthquake Observations & Parameters

The International Seismological Centre (ISC) combines seismic observations from ~150 agencies in ~100 counties to produce the definitive global earthquake catalogue by combining seismic phase arrivals. As well as seismic phase data, hypocentres and magnitudes the ISC Bulletin includes other earthquake parameters such as moment tensors that are reported by many agencies. This data is freely accessible, searchable and downloadable through the ISC website (www.isc.ac.uk/iscbulletin). The ISC Earthquake Toolbox for MATLAB provides access to this parametric earthquake data via a graphical user interface (GUI) within the MATLAB environment. The GUI replicates the search options of the ISC website and reads this data into MATLAB. Several live scripts are included to demonstrate how to interrogate the ISC Bulletin data. Examples include plotting earthquake aftershock sequences, comparing different magnitude and hypocentre types and authors, as well as plotting moment tensors reported in the ISC Bulletin. The toolbox also enables 3D visualisation of earthquake distributions, 2D and 3D moment tensor plotting, as well as introducing new functionality to plot moment tensors within MATLAB mapping toolbox figures. It is hoped that the ISC Earthquake Toolbox for MATLAB will be used as a teaching tool to explore the wealth of earthquake data available at the ISC, as well as a tool for researchers to build more complex applications upon. The toolbox is publicly available to download via GitHub (github.com/tomgarth/ISC_Earthquake_Toolbox) and MathWorks file exchange (https://uk.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/167786-isc-earthquake-toolbox).