Page 5 - MATLAB Recipes for Earth Sciences

Preface

Various books on data analysis in earth sciences have been published during
the last ten years, such as Statistics and Data Analysis in Geology by JC Davis,
Introduction to Geological Data Analysis by ARH Swan and M Sandilands,
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Data Analysis in the Earth Sciences Using MATLAB by GV Middleton or
Statistics of Earth Science Data by G Borradaile. Moreover, a number of
software packages have been designed for earth scientists such as the ESRI
product suite ArcGIS or the freeware package GRASS for generating geo-
graphic information systems, ERDAS IMAGINE or RSINC ENVI for remote
sensing and GOCAD and SURFER for 3D modeling of geologic features. In
addition, more general software packages as IDL by RSINC and MATLAB ®
by The MathWorks Inc. or the freeware software OCTAVE provide powerful
tools for the analysis and visualization of data in earth sciences.
Most books on geological data analysis contain excellent theoreti-
cal introductions, but no computer solutions to typical problems in earth
sciences, such as the book by JC Davis. The book by ARH Swan and
M Sandilands contains a number of examples, but without the use of com-

puters. G Middleton·s book firstly introduces MATLAB as a tool for earth

scientists, but the content of the book mainly reflects the personal interests
of the author, rather then providing a complete introduction to geological
data analysis. On the software side, earth scientists often encounter the prob-
lem that a certain piece of software is designed to solve a particular geologic
problem, such as the design of a geoinformation system or the 3D visualiza-
tion of a fault scarp. Therefore, earth scientists have to buy a large volume
of software products, and even more important, they have to get used to it
before being in the position to successfully use it.
This book on MATLAB Recipes for Earth Sciences is designed to help
undergraduate and PhD students, postdocs and professionals to learn meth-
ods of data analysis in earth sciences and to get familiar with MATLAB,
the leading software for numerical computations. The title of the book is
an appreciation of the book Numerical Recipes by WH Press and others
that is still very popular after initially being published in 1986. Similar to
the book by Press and others, this book provides a minimum amount of