1Université Libre de Bruxelles, École Polytechnique de Bruxelles (Brussels Faculty of Engineering),
Laboratory of Image Synthesis and Analysis (LISA)
2
Schmidt Institute of Physics of the Earth, Russian Academy of Sciences. Department of Natural
Disasters, Anthropogenic Hazards and Seismicity of the Earth. Laboratory of Regional Geophysics and
Natural Disasters
The functionality of Generic Mapping Tools (GMT) to process and
visualize geospatial information is crucial to the development of the
advanced cartographic method. This paper presents modelling and spatial
analysis of the marine geological data using GMT shell scripting. GMT
demonstrated effective cartographic solutions for visualization of the
georeferenced data. The particular feature of GMT consists in its scripting
modular approach that enables to use machine learning to explore reliable
georeferenced data. Here, the study applies a sequential shell scripting to
devise GMT modules for depicting marine geological data on the Mariana
Trench. The data cover bathymetry, geophysics, tectonics and geology. The
first method makes use of the 'nearneighbor' GMT module for grid contour
modelling using Nearest Neighbor algorithm. This form of modelling classifies
the geospatial data based on a similarity. The second method presents
surface modelling from the initial XYZ-ASCII dataset by a combination of the
'blockmean' and 'surface' modules. The third method includes the use of the
modules 'grdimage', 'psbasemap' and 'grdcontour' for plotting. Compared to
GIS methods in which data are processed in a menu, GMT presents the
console-based approach which automates cartographic data processing. The
results present seven new maps and explanations of scripts.A combination of
visual approaches applied using a color fill and various textures to represent
data, which is effective in allowing readers to assess geophysical setting. The
study demonstrated the effectiveness of GMT in geodata visualization.
Keywords:
cartography, machine learning, GMT, scripting, data analysis, data visualization.