Generic Mapping Tools: Improved Version Released
05 Nov 2013-Eos, Transactions American Geophysical Union (Wiley-Blackwell)-Vol. 94, Iss: 45, pp 409-410
TL;DR: Generic Mapping Tools is an open-source software package for the analysis and display of geoscience data, helping scientists to analyze, interpolate, filter, manipulate, project, and plot time series and gridded data sets.
Abstract: Generic Mapping Tools (GMT) is an open-source software package for the analysis and display of geoscience data, helping scientists to analyze, interpolate, filter, manipulate, project, and plot time series and gridded data sets. The GMT toolbox includes about 80 core and 40 supplemental program modules sharing a common set of command options, file structures, and documentation. Its power to process data and produce publication-quality graphic presentations has made it vital to a large scientific community that now includes more than 25,000 individual users. GMT's website (http://gmt.soest.hawaii.edu/) exceeds 20,000 visits per month, and server logs show roughly 2000 monthly downloads.
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TL;DR: GMT 6 defaults to classic mode and thus is a recommended upgrade for all GMT 5 users, and new users should take advantage of modern mode to make shorter scripts, quickly access commonly used global data sets, and take full advantage of the new tools to draw subplots, place insets, and create animations.
1,098 citations
Cites background from "Generic Mapping Tools: Improved Ver..."
...It took almost 10 years for the next major release [version 5; Wessel et al., 2013], as it included a major migration to a C‐language Application Program Interface (API)....
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...However, the release of GMT 5 (Wessel et al., 2013) introduced three key changes: (1) We provided a fully documented API for building new tools and libraries on top of GMTmodules and functions....
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TL;DR: Three decades of high-resolution Landsat 5 satellite imagery are used to investigate long-term trends in intense summertime near-surface phytoplankton blooms for 71 large lakes globally, revealing a worldwide exacerbation of bloom conditions.
Abstract: Freshwater blooms of phytoplankton affect public health and ecosystem services globally1,2. Harmful effects of such blooms occur when the intensity of a bloom is too high, or when toxin-producing phytoplankton species are present. Freshwater blooms result in economic losses of more than US$4 billion annually in the United States alone, primarily from harm to aquatic food production, recreation and tourism, and drinking-water supplies3. Studies that document bloom conditions in lakes have either focused only on individual or regional subsets of lakes4–6, or have been limited by a lack of long-term observations7–9. Here we use three decades of high-resolution Landsat 5 satellite imagery to investigate long-term trends in intense summertime near-surface phytoplankton blooms for 71 large lakes globally. We find that peak summertime bloom intensity has increased in most (68 per cent) of the lakes studied, revealing a global exacerbation of bloom conditions. Lakes that have experienced a significant (P < 0.1) decrease in bloom intensity are rare (8 per cent). The reason behind the increase in phytoplankton bloom intensity remains unclear, however, as temporal trends do not track consistently with temperature, precipitation, fertilizer-use trends or other previously hypothesized drivers. We do find, however, that lakes with a decrease in bloom intensity warmed less compared to other lakes, suggesting that lake warming may already be counteracting management efforts to ameliorate eutrophication10,11. Our findings support calls for water quality management efforts to better account for the interactions between climate change and local hydrological conditions12,13. Analyses show that the peak intensity of summertime phytoplankton blooms has increased in 71 large lakes globally over the past three decades, revealing a worldwide exacerbation of bloom conditions.
595 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors present the first continuous late-paleozoic to present-day global plate model with evolving plate boundaries, building on and extending two previously published models for the late Paleozoic and Mesozoic-Cenozoic (230-0-Ma).
561 citations
TL;DR: An accumulation zone is defined in the North Pacific subtropical gyre that closely corresponds to centers of accumulation resulting from the convergence of ocean surface currents predicted by several oceanographic numerical models.
Abstract: We present an extensive survey of floating plastic debris in the eastern North and South Pacific Oceans from more than 2500 plankton net tows conducted between 2001 and 2012. From these data we defined an accumulation zone (25 to 41°N, 130 to 180°W) in the North Pacific subtropical gyre that closely corresponds to centers of accumulation resulting from the convergence of ocean surface currents predicted by several oceanographic numerical models. Maximum plastic concentrations from individual surface net tows exceeded 106 pieces km–2, with concentrations decreasing with increasing distance from the predicted center of accumulation. Outside the North Pacific subtropical gyre the median plastic concentration was 0 pieces km–2. We were unable to detect a robust temporal trend in the data set, perhaps because of confounded spatial and temporal variability. Large spatiotemporal variability in plastic concentration causes order of magnitude differences in summary statistics calculated over short time periods or ...
375 citations
References
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TL;DR: The design and architecture of HydroDesktop is described, its novel contributions in web services-based hydrologic data search and discovery, and its unique extensibility interface that enables developers to create custom data analysis and visualization plug-ins are described.
Abstract: Discovering and accessing hydrologic and climate data for use in research or water management can be a difficult task that consumes valuable time and personnel resources. Until recently, this task required discovering and navigating many different data repositories, each having its own website, query interface, data formats, and descriptive language. New advances in cyberinfrastructure and in semantic mediation technologies have provided the means for creating better tools supporting data discovery and access. In this paper we describe a freely available and open source software tool, called HydroDesktop, that can be used for discovering, downloading, managing, visualizing, and analyzing hydrologic data. HydroDesktop was created as a means for searching across and accessing hydrologic data services that have been published using the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc. (CUAHSI) Hydrologic Information System (HIS). We describe the design and architecture of HydroDesktop, its novel contributions in web services-based hydrologic data search and discovery, and its unique extensibility interface that enables developers to create custom data analysis and visualization plug-ins. The functionality of HydroDesktop and some of its existing plug-ins are introduced in the context of a case study for discovering, downloading, and visualizing data within the Bear River Watershed in Idaho, USA.
177 citations